Alphabetical ordering of author surnames in academic publishing: A detriment to teamwork.

INTRODUCTION: In academia, many institutions use journal article publication productivity for making decisions on tenure and promotion, funding grants, and rewarding stellar scholars. Although non-alphabetical sequencing of article coauthoring by the spelling of surnames signals the extent to which a scholar has contributed to a project, many disciplines in academia follow the norm of alphabetical ordering of coauthors in journal publications. By assessing business academic publications, this study investigates the hypothesis that author alphabetical ordering disincentivizes teamwork and reduces the overall quality of scholarship. METHODS: To address our objectives, we accessed data from 21,353 articles published over a 20-year period across the four main business subdisciplines. The articles selected are all those published by the four highest-ranked journals (in each year) and four lower-ranked journals (in each year) for accounting, business technology, marketing, and organizational behavior. Poisson regression and binary logistic regression were utilized for hypothesis testing. RESULTS: This study finds that, although team size among business scholars is increasing over time, alphabetical ordering as a convention in journal article publishing disincentivizes author teamwork. This disincentive results in fewer authors per publication than for publications using contribution-based ordering of authors. Importantly, article authoring teamwork is related to article quality. Specifically, articles written by a single author typically are of lesser quality than articles published by coauthors, but the number of coauthors exhibits decreasing returns to scale-coauthoring teams of one to three are positively related to high-quality articles, but larger teams are not. Alphabetical ordering itself, however, is positively associated with quality even though it inhibits teamwork, but journal article coauthoring has a greater impact on article quality than does alphabetical ordering. CONCLUSIONS: These findings have important implications for academia. Scholars respond to incentives, yet alphabetical ordering of journal article authors conflicts with what is beneficial for the progress of academic disciplines. Based on these findings, we recommend that, to drive the highest-quality research, teamwork should be incentivized-all fields should adopt a contribution-based journal article author-ordering convention and avoid author ordering based upon the spelling of surnames. Although this study was undertaken using articles from business journals, its findings should generalize across all academia.

The use of exploratory factor analysis in public health: a note on parallel analysis as a factor retention criterion.

PURPOSE: Exploratory factor analysis is used to identify latent factors for public health interventions. The most popular factor retention criterion, the eigenvalue greater than one (EVG1) rule, leads to the retention of more factors than warranted. The use of parallel analysis (PA) as a factor retention criterion is recommended. DESIGN: Environmental factors that are likely to affect the propensity of individuals to walk are identified. Results from PA are compared with those obtained by using the EVG1 rule. SETTING: Telephone survey data were collected from three communities (spanning 12 counties) in the Appalachian region. PARTICIPANTS: The sample was composed of adults between the ages of 40 and 65 years. There were 1019 completed surveys. MEASURES: The data on 14 variables, including measures of neighborhood safety, beauty, and access to walking facilities were collected. ANALYSIS: A principal components analysis was performed. The factors retained after using the EVG1 rule were compared with the factors retained after using PA. Varimax rotation was used to aid factor interpretation. RESULTS: The EVG1 rule led to the retention of nearly twice the number of latent factors as did the PA criterion. CONCLUSION: The use of the EVG1 rule in research may mislead policy makers to focus on trivial interventions. They are urged to use PA to obtain more parsimonious and externally valid interventions.