If you’re interested in law & economics and your last name begins with a letter late in the alphabet, you should definitely aim for a law professor gig rather than a spot in an economics department. According to a forthcoming article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, tenure-track economics professors at top departments have a higher tenure rate if their surname begins early in the alphabet.
Why? The apparent explanation is that economics journals normally list authors alphabetically, and many papers have a number of co-authors, so co-authors with late surnames are destined to be lost in the haze of et. al. Also interesting: Authors with surnames late in the alphabet are less likely than others to co-author papers with large groups of co-authors.
Link via Kevin Drum and Alex Abarrok.
Has anyone let Prof. Zywicki know? I gather from his faculty bio that he’s tenured already. Close scrape!
In mathematics we also list authors alphabetically, however, since papers are rarely written by more than three people no one uses “et. al.” I’ll be curious to see if this article places the blame on the use of “et. al.” or on alphabetical priority itself.
Thankfully in physics alphabetical order is not standard. Unfortunately there are still some people who insist on it. This study should prove extremely useful in helping those of us with alphabetically undesireable last names to stave off their advances.
YLS Prof. Judith Resnik, at least as recently as five years ago, insisted that all cites in articles she published be written out fully–that is, you couldn’t say Rob Jones et al., “Law Review Article”–you had to say “Rob Jones, Bob Smith, and Sally Brown.” She reasoned that junior faculty members were more likely to be women, and therefore more likely to be later in a list of authors, so that “et al.” disproportionately erased women authors’ names.
I was the author of the first section of a lengthy part of Georgetown’s Criminal Procedure Project while on Law Journal. This has resulted in a fair number of citations to my name “et al.” quite possibly for portions of the article that I had nothing to do with. I always thought that was unfair, but I must confess not unfair in a way that made me too upset.