AMOR: Ambiguous Authorship Order
Maximilian Weiherer Andreea Dogaru Shreya Kapoor Hannah Schieber Bernhard Egger
As we all know, writing scientific papers together with our beloved
colleagues is a truly remarkable experience (partially): endless discussions
about the same useless paragraph over and over again, followed by long days and
long nights -- both at the same time. What a wonderful ride it is! What a
beautiful life we have. But wait, there's one tiny little problem that utterly
shatters the peace, turning even renowned scientists into bloodthirsty
monsters: author order. The reason is that, contrary to widespread opinion,
it's not the font size that matters, but the way things are ordered. Of course,
this is a fairly well-known fact among scientists all across the planet (and
beyond) and explains clearly why we regularly have to read about yet another
escalated paper submission in local police reports.
  In this paper, we take an important step backwards to tackle this issue by
solving the so-called author ordering problem (AOP) once and for all.
Specifically, we propose AMOR, a system that replaces silly constructs like
co-first or co-middle authorship with a simple yet easy probabilistic approach
based on random shuffling of the author list at viewing time. In addition to
AOP, we also solve the ambiguous author ordering citation problem} (AAOCP) on
the fly. Stop author violence, be human.