[mattkrause]

The automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia.

I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.

[bjourne]

What "informal credit assignment"? It's automated and it runs entirely on quantitative data.

[remexre]

the one where i think of a particular piece of work, and i know who did it, then tell a student "oh, see if $author's group published anything else about this."

i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students

[mattkrause]

There’s a cute study demonstrating this effect by comparing career success in economics and psychology.

The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true.

In most psychology journals, the author list is instead ordered by contribution/senority, and this effect disappears. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677652608...

[bjourne]

I see. The informal credit assignment process is something that only runs inside of your head.

[ohnei]

Right, academics who deligate their entire intellectual life to GPT will be unaffected.

[bjourne]

Right, and everyone else unaware of this made up "informal credit assignment process".

[mattkrause]

I don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition.

Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.

[ohnei]

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[halJordan]

So we're talking about this woman's contribution. And you're talking about how the system is depriving her of recognition.

Do you see the inherent tension in what you're claiming vs the lived experience of everyone in this post (including you!)?

[mattkrause]

Cmon…We’re saying that a certain style of reference gives her less credit than might be due. Not none at all.

One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should).

But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.