For what it is worth. I found out last week I was excluded as a credited inventor on a patent that I worked for 2.5 years on. Industry does this stuff too...
I know it may not be worth pursuing, but that specifically can invalidate a patent.
Correct. I have already reached out to my former company and I have a stack of paperwork coming to "correct the oversight" it helps that the company didn't know that the patent application had been filed by the client.
Umm, that sounds very illegal?
It sounds that way because it is.
This is why workers forced movies and shows to put everyone in the closing credits.
Y'all need to unionize.
From what I can tell, et al. is not about socio-political power*. It's just a necessity for ease and efficiency. In-text citations need to be short to limit wasted space. Otherwise, we'd have lots of text dedicated to unnecessary names. An in-text citation that reads (Perez et al., 2023) is much more efficient than (Perez, Washington, Smith, Iwukuni, Johnson, Patel, Boofy, Yamirez, Tate, Hendrix, Apple, Man, & Gargamel, 2023).
Using 7th ed. APA, the citation entries in the bibliography/references include upto the first 20 authors, so contributors are rarely omitted.
It's not like these are written on literal paper. It's the 21st century, There's no reason to save space in digital documents when you can just format them differently.
Yeah I imagine they could have some sort of click to expand functionality
~~Literally even a spot bumped out on the end where they list everyone, at the very end of the paper, would be infinitely better than "et Al"~~
Uhhhhhh
Yeah I have no defense for this other than having a dumb moment.
Carry on... ^please^
That's what bibliography is. It's already like that, or am I missing something?
It sounds like you're talking about the references, which already list all authors
Then what's the issue? Sounds to me like papers already have comprehensive credits.
Is the issue that it's displayed in two places, so people don't bother to check out the second?
Screens still have real estate that you need to fit onto. You can do "click to expand" but frankly, who would look at that. You could have the full list in the bibliography section, but frankly, who reads all that: The stuff I look at is the citation abbreviation ([Miller et al 2003]), then the doi or journal/paper title to copy and paste. Everything in between gets ignored, if I read names then it's on paper titles, not citations. I've also seen a tongue-in-cheek proposal to overlay all author names on top of another in citations, sadly can't find the paper.
Typography isn't the place where you want to attack this issue, at most you can get some token feel-good result that will be ineffective because it ignores the psychology of people looking up papers. Which is to say: You'll do net damage to your cause because you're spending goodwill capital on feel-good BS. If you want to have a systemic impact then attack the issue from the other end, such as cracking down on people which insert themselves as first author of every paper coming out of their department and stuff. Rule of thumb: If someone can't do a thesis style oral defence of a paper, their name has no business being anywhere even close to the front. I don't care when the administrative boss is listed at the end, though they should have the decency to put themselves after any assistant who did actual scientific work, even if it's just pipette wrangling.
Equality of et al - how about no one gets their names inserted into the paper, everyone is just put in the bibliography. No "first authors." Instead, the institution gets the reference i.e. instead of (Miller et al 2005) it can be (Cornell U. et al 2005). Then, because it's digital, mouse over the reference for a full list of people involved.
Solves the problem of worthless administration slapping their personal name on it.
The IEEE reference style guide actually often works just like this, the entire reference is just a number in brackets in the text and then the details of the reference is in the bibliography at the end. For example
...a high correlation as shown in [5]...
[5] A.N. Author, P. Ostdoc, and O. Verworked "A paper about a thing" Department, University, City, etc.
This is the citation format that makes the most sense to me, especially now that you can just click [5] and be brought straight to the bibliography.
Same for ACM. I think it's good as it's easier to read. But sometimes I still write names (e.g. as Mueller et al. points out, the color blue is actually red [666]), to highlight something. But that's maybe for 5 out of 100 sources.
The idea being that when you go to view the citation, you see the details that were previously et al.
Whereas on movie credits, that's your one chance to be seen credited on the work, outside of IMDB maybe.
And at the same time, you can still get credit for the paper in your resumee etc.
~~scholars~~ R1 uni PR team: "become a scholar! it'll give you more opportunities in the future!"
scholars: "there are too many scholars!"
No scholar would ever tell anyone else to become a scholar. More like "Run! Run while you can! Get away from this cursed existence!"
you're right. fixed
Has any researcher ever tried legally changing their name to "et al" ? Like in day to day life you could just be Al but you would also be the most published scientist in history.
It would also mean being involved in the most lawsuits, unfortunately.
Glass half full approach: "I am the single most cited author in existence"
Some disciplines use alphabetical order. I'd like to see a study that looks into if in this fields, does it impact the prosperity of tenure and grant funding?
On the opposite side, being the only person working in the lab (especially when dealing with animal models) can be absolutely miserable - ask me how I know...
How do you know?
This guy follows documentation.
"The movie star...and the rest!"
Simple fix, change legal name to Al.
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