Author placement in Computer Science: a study based on the careers of ACM Fellows

Abstract

The order in which authors of a scientific paper place their names on the byline follows in many research fields some implicit rules. In most fields, the first author is considered to be the one who contributed most to the intellectual effort described in the paper. Additionally, the last author is normally the most senior researcher and in many situations the contribution to the paper is more indirect. In this manuscript, we intend to analyse the evolution of the positions of computer science (CS) researchers on the bylines of scientific papers throughout their careers. In particular, this bibliometic study considers the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellows (the most prestigious members) that present a long and rich publication record. Our hypothesis is that young CS authors tend to have their names placed in the first positions of the bylines, while senior CS researchers are often considered as last authors. Several statistical analyses were conducted by using biblometric data collected from ACM Fellows and other CS researchers. Overall, the obtained results do confirm our initial hypothesis.