Abstract
There is a considerable evidence that academicians who have surname initials that are placed early in the alphabet have advantage in publications, citations and other academic outcomes when they work in academic fields that order author names alphabetically. We analyze the distributions of the full professors’ surnames initial letters in nine academic fields. We are unable to find the expected effect of alphabetization on the academic careers. The academicians who have surname initials that are placed early in the alphabet are not more prevalent in alphabetic academic fields compared to non-alphabetic academic fields. The academicians who are at the top departments are not more likely to have surname initials that are placed early in the alphabet compared to the academicians who are at the lower ranked departments.
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Notes
Shanghai Rankings: <www.shanghairanking.com>; US News Rankings: <grad-schools.usnews. rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools>; Einav and Yariv (2006) data is available at: <people.stanford.edu/leinav/research>.
The number of publications are different from Table 2 because we also have publications from 6 to 10 authors in Fig. 1. We have 7334 articles in chemistry, 2056 articles in civil engineering, 758 articles in economics, 2538 articles in mathematics, 3707 articles mechanical engineering, 5799 articles in physics, 280 articles in political science, 3752 articles in psychology and 454 articles in sociology.
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Yuret, T. Does alphabetization significantly affect academic careers?. Scientometrics 108, 1603–1619 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2058-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2058-3