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Prior investigations have offered contrasting results on a troubling question: whether the alphabetical ordering of bylines confers citation advantages on those authors whose surnames put them first in the list. The previous studies analyzed the surname effect at publication level, i.e. whether papers with the first author early in the alphabet trigger more citations than papers with a first author late in the alphabet. We adopt instead a different approach, by analyzing the surname effect on citability at the individual level, i.e. whether authors with alphabetically earlier surnames result as being more cited. Examining the question at both the overall and discipline levels, the analysis finds no evidence whatsoever that alphabetically earlier surnames gain advantage. The same lack of evidence occurs for the subpopulation of scientists with very high publication rates, where alphabetical advantage might gain more ground. The field of observation consists of 14,467 scientists in the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Author alphabetization for two-author social sciences research articles is above the expected value for almost all social sciences. [•] The mean levels of alphabetization of research article authorship for two-author social sciences articles from 2010 and 1995 are very similar. [•] The percentage of multi-author articles in alphabetical order varies substantially between disciplines, from 4% to 67%. [•] Disciplines with a high percentage of two-author articles in alphabetical order tend to have first authors near the beginning of the alphabet. [•] The findings suggest that alphabetization may be affecting careers across most of the social sciences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There are different ways in which the authors of a scientific publication can determine the order in which their names are listed. Sometimes author names are simply listed alphabetically. In other cases, authorship order is determined based on the contribution authors have made to a publication. Contribution-based authorship can facilitate proper credit assignment, for instance by giving most credits to the first author. In the case of alphabetical authorship, nothing can be inferred about the relative contribution made by the different authors of a publication. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of the use of alphabetical authorship in scientific publishing. Our analysis covers all fields of science. We find that the use of alphabetical authorship is declining over time. In 2011, the authors of less than 4% of all publications intentionally chose to list their names alphabetically. The use of alphabetical authorship is most common in mathematics, economics (including finance), and high energy physics. Also, the use of alphabetical authorship is relatively more common in the case of publications with either a small or a large number of authors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]