<p>So I was at this seminar and chatting with a Physics student few days ago, he said that in Physics... a lot of papers just rank the authors in alphabetical order, so it saves the trouble of debating who gets the first author, who gets the second etc..... in converse to my field and I believe in most fields, people fight hard for the first-author or at least it's a big deal...</p>
<p>I found it shocking and hard to believe, is that true in the Physics world??!</p>
<p>Just looking at recent publications it is not true. Also recent published physics paper of son did not do this.</p>
<p>Every group has their own ways of doing it. Typically, however, the first and last names are the ones you look at on a paper - the first being the grad student who did most of the legwork and the last being the head of the lab, usually.</p>
<p>hmm, so I guess the alphabetical order thing is only his group’s culture, doesn’t represent the overall Physics scene?</p>
<p>In pure math authors are always listed alphabetically…</p>
<p>In computer science, the authors are listed alphabetically.</p>
<p>Interesting. In EE, they certainly are not listed alphabetically.</p>
<p>Momwaitingfornew, what are the premier journals in CS? I looked up some of the IEEE CS journals but they seemed to be in non-alphabetical order.</p>
<p>In my experience it’s definitely not alphabetical in CS.</p>
<p>@lizzardfire: Depends on your field. For example in computer vision it’s either IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence or International Journal of Computer Vision. Also, in CS people generally prefer to submit to conferences because they have faster turnaround time. As a result, we have some very good conferences whose reputation matches those of the premium journals.</p>