Fun ways of deciding authorship order

Summary

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: Authorship determined by basketball skills is certainly an early contender for most fun way of determining authorship order. That led me to ask on twitter for other examples . . . which got lots of replies! It turns out there was precedent for using athletic pursuits to determine authorship order. Hassell & May (1974, J. Animal Ecology) chose authors based on a 25 game croquet series (ht: Robin Choudhury, Noam Ross, Adam Stuckert). (Is croquet an athletic pursuit? Whatever, I’m sticking with it.) Some choose to go with random approaches. There’s the classic coin flip, used by Miller & Ballard (1992 Wildlife Society Bulletin) and surely others (ht: Jeremy): Or the more modern version: However, sometimes geography makes a coin flip difficult, in which case authors use more creative approaches, as in the case of Feder & Mitchell-Olds (2003, Nature Reviews Genetics) (ht: Stephen Heard, in his book on writing) I wish they’d explained more! Others have used very practical concerns to determine authorship order of Roderick & Gillespie (1998 Mol...