 Does your surname affect the citability of your publications?Giovanni Abramo and D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea Journal of Informetrics, 2017, vol. 11, issue 1, 121-127 Abstract: 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. Keywords: Alphabetical discrimination; Bibliometrics; Byline; Research evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:11:y:2017:i:1:p:121-127 DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2016.12.003 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier |
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