Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

Last spring, I did a poll related to authorship order in ecology. I’ve written up a couple of posts presenting the results of that poll (part 1, part 2), and plan on writing more. But, for now, I want to focus on some . . . less standard ways of deciding authorship for ecology and evolutionary biology papers.* It all started with this tweet (which makes me also want to write a post with best opening lines of ecology & evolution papers — give suggestions in the comments!**): https://twitter.com/SophieLGilbert/status/775747332285444096 My reply to that was that there’s another Hairston & Hairston paper (1993 AmNat) where authorship was determined alphabetically: I realize that it’s not that uncommon for folks to alphabetize authorship order, but it probably doesn’t usually require getting to the 21st letter of the name to break the tie! That sparked this tweet about Fauth & Resetarits (1991 Ecology), which is what motivated this post: I'm kind partial to the time when authorship wa ... Read full article.