Journal
SCIENTOMETRICS
Volume 127, Issue 5, Pages 2173-2193Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04322-9
Keywords
Alphabetization; Co-authorship; Citations; Web of science
Funding
- Projekt DEAL
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This article revisits a previous study and finds that the alphabetization rate in economics has declined, and there is no significant relationship between alphabetized co-authorship and citations. However, alphabetization may increase citation rates in high-impact journals, and the likelihood of non-alphabetized co-authorship increases with the number of authors.
In this article, we revisit the analysis of Laband and Tollison (Appl Econ 38(14):1649-1653, 2006) who documented that articles with two authors in alphabetical order are cited much more often than non-alphabetized papers with two authors in the American Economic Review and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Using more than 120,000 multi-authored articles from the Web of Science economics subject category, we demonstrate first that the alphabetization rate in economics has declined over the last decade. Second, we find no statistically significant relationship between alphabetized co-authorship and citations in economics using six different regression settings (the coefficients are very small). This result holds mostly true when accounting both for journal heterogeneity and intentionally or incidentally alphabetical ordering of authors. We find some evidence that alphabetization in case of two authos increases citations rates for very high-impact journals. Third, we show that the likelihood of non-alphabetized co-authorship increases the more authors an article has.
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