They do things differently there 

The past is another country, said H E Bates, but so too is economics, it seems. Things are different in the domain of economics: anyone coming to academic publishing for the first time might think that all the advantages of consistent metadata were known and accepted by now. Basically, if you write a scholarly article, you have to follow the (frequently unwritten) rules for it to be interpretable by machines. One principle that is (slowly) becoming generally agreed is the ordering of contributors to a paper – generally agreed, that is, except in economics.

Pilita Clark, in an article in the Financial Times (7 October 2024) reveals that economics is unique as a scholarly domain in that many published peer-reviewed articles have author names ordered alphabetically.

One 2006 paper that analysed data from the top 35 US economics departments said having an earlier surname meant you were more likely to get tenure at a top 10 department, become a fellow of the Econometric Society and receive a Nobel Prize.

As a result, some economists proposed ordering paper authors randomly, by tossing a coin (which they rather grandiosely call “certified random order”). The symbol “r” between the names of authors represents a random order – which is accepted by the American Economic Association, one of the most prestigious economics learned societies, among others, as a style for published articles.

Yet this flies in the face of a common system for ordering of authors in other domains. There is a NISO standard, CRediT, for assigning roles to contributors to a scholarly paper. CRediT provides no fewer than 14 roles for a contributor, such as “conceptualization”, or “writing – review and editing”, (but which, sadly, does not include making the tea, one of the great strengths I feel I could bring to an research team).  Instead, we have a random listing that provides no idea of the relative roles of the contributors. Worse, it contradicts the de facto implied ranking of authors in a traditional PDF, where the contributor roles might not be explicitly stated, but the order of authors is usually considered to have significance, for example, with the first named author as the person who contributed most to the article.

To outsiders, the idea of randomly ordering the authors of a paper may appear to be democratic, but any system, whether A-Z, random, or based on implied categories, will only work if used consistently. In any case, a random order of names may well fail to mask the recognised names among the authors, names which their peers will no doubt recognise.

This is yet another quirk of the scholarly publication process. Another one is the curious, perhaps unique, structure of many law journals, which, I wrote about: in the USA, at least, law journals are frequently edited by undergraduate law students at the same institution where the authors are based. After all, said one editor, “who else has time to check that sources say what the authors claim they say?”

It would seem that scholarly publishing’s attempts to create a universe of credible, peer-reviewed articles that is consistent across all domains is rife with exceptions. Unfortunately, the fragmented, and non-hierarchical world of the academy makes change unlikely to happen. So we are left with scholarly publishing where everything is genuinely peer reviewed, except for law. And authors are increasingly systematically credited, except for economics. What other quirks will we find across the scholarly landscape?