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Comment by dependenttypes | Hacker News Reader

> there are more women in high status (first or last) author positions in the open science community

Is this true even when excluding fields and papers where names go in alphabetic order?

Which fields put names in alphabetical order? In medicine, at least, deciding who goes in the first and last name spots is a really big deal, and fights over this sometimes ruin professional relationships.

My impression is that the order of the authors is extremly important in medical research, very important in releated fields like biochemistry and molecular biology and still quite important in bioinformatics, while in fields like mathematics and computer science the autors can decide to list the authors alphabetically. This correlates quite nicely with the level of competetiveness in the respecive fields.

Author names in alphabetical order is pretty ubiquitous in pure mathematics. There are also usually few (1-5) authors on a paper, and some people who contribute a small amount to a paper (say, a nicer proof of a lemma) are not listed as an author, but thanked elsewhere in the paper.

I think the reason this works for pure maths and not some other fields is that pure maths is quite “slow”, in that people don’t release papers nearly as frequently as other fields, and the papers tend to be longer.

It seems somewhat common in cryptography.

They statistically controlled for field so the answer is probably yes.

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