TABLE OF CONTENTS In 1940, over 90% of papers reviewed in Mathematical Reviews had one author [120]. Today that figure is about 50%, showing that the proportion of jointly authored works in mathematics has increased greatly.
There are no hard and fast rules about the order in which the authors of a multiply authored paper are listed. Sometimes the person who did the greatest part of the work is listed first. Sometimes the academically senior person is listed first. In some disciplines and institutions the senior person (typically the director of a laboratory) is listed last. Perhaps most often, the authors are listed alphabetically, which is the practice I favour.
It is the custom in the theoretical computer science community to order authors alphabetically. In a tongue-in-cheek article, Tompa [273] defines the spotlight factor of the first author of a paper in which the k authors are listed alphabetically to be the probability that if k ?1 coauthors are chosen independently at random they will all have surnames later in the alphabet than the first author. According to Tompa, the best (smallest) spotlight factor of 0.0255 in theoretical computer science belongs to Santoro, for his paper "Geometric containment and vector dominance" [Nicola Santoro, Jeffrey B. Sidney, Stuart J. Sidney, and Jorge Urrutia. Theoretical Computer Science, 53:345-352, 1987]. This value is calculated as
where a = 1, , z = 26 and blanks or punctuation are represented by zero. By...
