Ordering authors by contribution invites other conflicts and politics, which seems a lot worse. To be clear, I am not at all advocating for abolishing the practice of ordering authors alphabetically. The same effects were not observed in the psychology profession, where authorship is not alphabetized. economics departments “with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize,” even after controlling for “country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects.” A 2006 research paper by economics professors from Stanford and Caltech showed that faculty in top 35 U.S. This creates an interesting effect when you scroll to the bottom of a math department directory.Įconomists, like mathematicians, also have co-authorship alphabetized by default. (Another aside) While we are on the topic of names, it’s also worth pointing out that Chinese surnames tend to cluster late in the alphabet. Looking back, I think perhaps the editors had sometimes intended to ask the other Y. (Aside) As a grad student, every once in a while I was sent some combinatorics paper to referee, but these papers weren’t exactly close to anything I worked on. Readers are also less likely to distinguish common names and associate them with specific individuals, leading to less recognition and exposure, and this can have an adverse effect especially on early-career academics. So first name initialization can lead to ambiguity. In many Asian cultures, a large fraction of the population use a fairly small number of surnames (e.g., Wang, Li, Kim). It is common practice to shorten first names to initials in references. Include author names as they appear in the original publication

Rather, I focus on my own conventions and choices, specifically tailored for math research papers. This blog post is not a beginner’s guide on BibTeX (here is a good guide). Here are some of my own processes and conventions, along with my rationale behind some of the choices. Retrieve complete and accurate bibliographic records, and.Since a single paper can have a large number of references, it is useful to have a simple system to I use BibTeX for compiling my bibliographic references when writing math papers in LaTeX.īibTeX, when used correctly, eases the burden of bibliographic management.įor example, BibTeX automatically excludes uncited references and alphabetizes the entries. This is both a how-to guide, and a discussion of the rationale for some of my preferences.

Bibdesk with word