Heider College of Business, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, United States of America.
School of Business Administration, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 May 5;16(5):e0251176. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0251176. eCollection 2021.
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.
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.
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.
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.
在学术界，许多机构使用期刊文章发表的生产力来决定终身教职和晋升、资助拨款以及奖励杰出学者。虽然按姓氏拼写对文章合著者进行非字母顺序排列表明了学者对项目的贡献程度，但学术界的许多学科都遵循期刊出版物中按作者字母顺序排列合著者的规范。通过评估商业学术出版物，本研究调查了以下假设：作者字母顺序排列不利于团队合作，并降低学术研究的整体质量。
为了实现我们的目标，我们访问了 20 年来四个主要商业子学科的 21353 篇文章的数据。选择的文章是所有在四个最高排名期刊（每年）和四个较低排名期刊（每年）发表的文章，涵盖会计、商业技术、营销和组织行为。我们利用泊松回归和二元逻辑回归进行假设检验。
本研究发现，尽管商业学者的团队规模随着时间的推移在不断增加，但期刊文章出版中的字母顺序惯例不利于作者团队合作。这种抑制作用导致每篇出版物的作者数量少于基于贡献对作者进行排序的出版物。重要的是，文章作者团队合作与文章质量有关。具体来说，单作者撰写的文章通常质量低于合著者发表的文章，但合著者的数量呈现出递减的规模回报——一到三个合著者的团队与高质量文章呈正相关，但更大的团队则不然。然而，即使字母顺序排列会抑制团队合作，但它与质量呈正相关，而期刊文章合著者对文章质量的影响大于字母顺序排列。
这些发现对学术界具有重要意义。学者对激励措施做出反应，但期刊文章作者的字母顺序排列与学术学科发展的利益相悖。基于这些发现，我们建议为了推动最高质量的研究，应该激励团队合作——所有领域都应采用基于贡献的期刊文章作者排序惯例，并避免基于姓氏拼写的作者排序。虽然这项研究是使用商业期刊的文章进行的，但它的发现应该适用于所有学术界。
