In an earlier post in my series of posts on publication peculiarities, I wrote about author lists. Here are some more offerings on the same topic.
Number of Authors
A contender for the world record for the paper with the greatest number of authors is the 5,154-author paper
G. Aad, B. Abbott, J. Abdallah, O. Abdinov et al., Combined measurement of the Higgs boson mass in
Collisions at
and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Phys. Rev. Lett., 114, 191803, 2015.
It comprises 8.5 pages of text and 24.5 pages of author list and author addresses.
Names that Relate to the Paper Title
New Scientist magazine used the term nominative determinism for the tendency for authors to gravitate to fields of research related to their surname. (See this article for more background on the term.)
A. G. Cock, Genetical Studies on Growth and Form in the Fowl, Genetical Research 4, 167-192, 1963.
A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon, The Urethral Syndrome: Experience with the Richardson Urethroplasty, British Journal of Urology 49, 173-176, 1977.
Zhian Sun and Keith Shine, Studies of the Radiative Properties of Ice and Mixed-Phase Clouds, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 120, 111-137, 1994.
Relations
It’s not hard to find examples of husband-wife co-authors. Other relations are less common.
Brothers:
Nicholas J. Higham and Desmond J. Higham, Large Growth Factors in Gaussian Elimination with Pivoting, SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 10, 155-164, 1989.
Father (second author) and son (first author):
Alex Olshevsky and Vadim Olshevsky, Kharitonov’s Theorem and Bezoutians, Linear Algebra Appl., 399 (1), 285-297, 2005.
Michael Stewart and G. W. Stewart, On Hyperbolic Triangularization: Stability and Pivoting, SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 19, 847-860, 1998
Mother (Alicja) and daughter (Agata):
Alicja Smoktunowicz, Agata Smoktunowicz, and Ewa Pawelec, The three-term recursion for Chebyshev polynomials is mixed forward-backward stable, Numerical Algorithm, 69(4), 785–794, 2015.
Grandfather (Walter) and grandson (Daniel):
Walter Ledermann, Carol Alexander and Daniel Ledermann, Random Orthogonal Matrix Simulation, Linear Algebra Appl. 434, 1444-1467, 2011
Rhyming Names
G. E. P. Box and D. R. Cox, An Analysis of Transformations, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) 26, 211-252, 1964.
Pronounced the same but spelled differently:
Peter D. Burns and Roy S. Berns, Error Propagation Analysis in Color Measurement and Imaging, Color Research & Application 22, 280-289, 1997
The latter paper also has the distinction of having a DOI that I cannot get to parse correctly in this post: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6378(199708)22:4<280::AID-COL9>3.0.CO;2-L
Names that are Colours
R. A. Brown and C. H. Green, Threats to Health or Safety: Perceived Risk and Willingness-To-Pay, Social Science & Medicine. Part C: Medical Economics 15, 67-75, 1981.
Esther Black and Craig White, Fear of Recurrence, Sense of Coherence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Haematological Cancer Survivors, Psycho-Oncology 14, 510-515, 2005
Opposites
The next article includes the unusual combination of Wright and Wrong.
S. Levi, C. T. Dollery, S. R. Bloom, J. Calam, T. M. Cox, H. J. F. Hodgson, M. S. Losowsky, M. B. Pepys, N. A. Wright, and O. M. Wrong, Campylobacter Pylori, Duodenal Ulcer Disease, and Gastrin, BMJ 299, 1093-1094, 1989.
Ones That Got Away
Many years ago Ron Mitchell, of the University of Dundee, told me that there was a report or paper by Collar and Tie, the first author presumably being the engineer Arthur Roderick Collar. I have not being able to locate this publication.
Fictitious Authors
There are a number of examples of fictitious authors with amusing names being included on papers. I will not try to document any here, but point to The true story of Stronzo Bestiale (and others scientific jokes) for some examples.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Des Higham for pointing out Box and Cox, Brown and Green, and Cock, which are taken from Learning LaTeX (page 40) by D. F. Griffiths and D. J. Higham.
Nick Higham 