Fig 1.
Example of a sequence break due to multiple last names.
Fig 2.
Probability of intentional alphabetical order (Pi) as a function of the team size (N) and the length of the alphabetical sequence (r).
Table 1.
Description of each field of the data file used for analysis.
Fig 3.
Proportion of article bylines containing intentional alphabetical order as a function of team size (left), and publication year (right).
Table 2.
Logistic regression predicting the likelihood of an article containing alphabetically ordered middle authors based on the team size and the publication year.
Fig 4.
Average share of primary, middle and supervisory authors as a function of team size (left) and publication year (right).
Table 3.
Coefficients of the multiple regression to predict the share of middle authors from the team size and the publication year.
Fig 5.
Evolution of the overall relative contribution of alphabetically ordered middle authors to biomedical research.