I wonder if this was inspired by a recent xkcd?
At text: People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren’t too many of them.
I thought we already did authorship in alphabetical order so as to avoid any implied hierarchy?
Every paper comes with an author appendix as cut-out scrabble tiles (scrambled) so readers assemble the names in the order they prefer.
Now whoever has the longest name has an advantage
International collaboration with Spaniards and Hispanics instantly drops to 0.
Not only is this paper real: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01393.pdf
But they actually made it practical:
We have implemented two ways to reveal the actual names present in an overlapping stack, when viewing a PDF file on a computer.
First, hovering over the stacked names should pop up a tooltip with the authors listed in their original order, as shown in Figure 1.
This feature works on many desktop PDF viewers (e.g., Acrobat, Evince, Firefox, VSCode), but notably not Chrome, Edge, Safari, or MacOS Preview. It also does not work on mobile devices we tested (probably because they lack a natural notion of “hovering”).
That doesn’t sound very practical at all.
All it’s done is force you to read a tooltip. Which is an awful idea. The tooltips still create a first-author situation, so now your forced to screw around with a tooltip for…. Nothing.
I mean, relatively practical. Just the fact that they actually made an effort. It’s not much different from having it in a footnote
I may be missing the point, but why not instead list names in whatever order, but clarify who contributed what.
Order matters in academia whether the authors want it to or not. Other academics will look at the order of the authors and make judgements based on that, so you’d have to specify something like “authors listed alphabetically”.
In math and (theoretical) physics alphabetical is the presumed norm.
