A thread on #authorship and author ordering. A few weeks ago an external reviewer for an academic job application wrote in their review that I did not have enough 1st-author publications. Very relevant piece of info is that the reviewer is an astronomer! 1/10

I had not appreciated up to then 1) how much astronomers care about author ordering and 2) how much my last name beginning by "V" penalized me in this sense, both earlier in my career where I worked much more on hep-ph/gr-qc and ordering is conventionally alphabetical... 2/10

...but also in cases where there are multiple 1st-authors and one resorts to a 1st alphabetical tier for them. The net result is that I have many papers where I am not 1st author (in may cases actually last!), but would have been had the astronomy convention been followed 3/10

In my publications list I tried to explain this briefly but clearly failed. In hindsight I should have been more proactive in the past demanding to be 1st author on papers where I clearly should have been one, but that's past+author ordering can't be changed post-publication 4/10

So today I decided it was time to create an astronomy-proof version of my publications list, highlighting these ambiguities in a more user-friendly way, using special symbols to mark papers where I would have been 1st or 2nd author had the astronomy convention been followed. 5/10

I divided my publications list in the following sections:
1) Papers with 1st-author or equivalent contribution
2) Papers with 2nd-author or equivalent contribution
3) N-th author papers
4) Collaboration papers
5) Preprints
6) Other academic works
6/10

Most importantly, I added this clarifying paragraph at the start of the list 7/10

And I used the following legend to clarify my role in the papers featuring in the "Papers with 1st-author or equivalent contribution" and "Papers with 2nd-author or equivalent contribution" sections 8/10

So that an excerpt from my "Papers with 1st-author or equivalent contribution" section of my publications list would look something like this (note the symbols from the previous legend appearing near the numbers) 9/10

Looking for feedback especially from astronomers or people who work at the crossroads of HEP/cosmo/astro: are the clarifying paragraph and legend clear enough? How do you deal with these issues? #astrotwitter #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter #authorship #AcademicJobMarket 10/10