She was a CS PhD and somewhat itinerant professor with a long career who wrote a prominent CS paper about computer memory, Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588

on her obituary page, you will see a prominent "Memory Wall" link that is NOT a reference to her paper, but a place for sharing your thoughts about her life

you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee"

I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor

> you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee"

    Wulf et al.
    Wulf and McKee

35% less isn't usually described as "practically more".

It'd be interesting to see someone use the unabbreviated form; I have a hunch they wouldn't know to say "et alia".

How did you arrive at 35% less? The first is 11 characters, the second is 14, and 3/14 is 21%.

That is a good question. As you say, it's 21%. I had the 11 and the 14 correct; I don't remember how I got 35%.

There's only two authors! That's so rude!

It’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)

No, plural can’t be deduced from how it is written.

"et alia" usually means "and others", but technically in Latin "alia" can be either plural neuter or singular female!

Pardon, you’re right

The automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia.

I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.

What "informal credit assignment"? It's automated and it runs entirely on quantitative data.

the one where i think of a particular piece of work, and i know who did it, then tell a student "oh, see if $author's group published anything else about this."

i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students

There’s a cute study demonstrating this effect by comparing career success in economics and psychology.

The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true.

In most psychology journals, the author list is instead ordered by contribution/senority, and this effect disappears. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677652608...

Right, academics who deligate their entire intellectual life to GPT will be unaffected.

Right, and everyone else unaware of this made up "informal credit assignment process".

I don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition.

Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.

That is false. The first thing everyone (at least everyone in CS---IDK about other fields) looks at are h-indexes, impact factors, number of papers per year, university rankings, and similar metrics. Researchers are most definitely selecting collaborators with a high h-index.

So we're talking about this woman's contribution. And you're talking about how the system is depriving her of recognition.

Do you see the inherent tension in what you're claiming vs the lived experience of everyone in this post (including you!)?

Cmon…We’re saying that a certain style of reference gives her less credit than might be due. Not none at all.

One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should).

But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.

its about respect, not about academic score tracking systems

et al should never be applied when only two authors!!!

...unless the second one is named Alfred and is an informal person

Bruce et al

Yeah tenure is nice but there's just a hint of mystery behind the title "itinerant professor." Like a wizard that just pops up in places to work computer science magic.

I was a phd student when sally was a professor at Utah. I get the feeling that a lot of people came together for an interesting project (systems/memory related, I can’t even remember the name ATM) and dispersed when the project was at its later stages. I think it’s common in our field for many phds to work as professors for just a few years and not commit to it as a career.

bit ironic i guess but unintentionally fitting

for me, doing the heavy lifting is doing the heavy lifting

Fun fact: the word suffer comes from sub fer - under load, this relation (suffer - load bearing) is consistent across (unrelated) languages

Also too many lands and hits.

>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different

organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion.

don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do.

humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.