[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...