Why do you want to switch your name with your co-author?

A perennial academic question resurfaced on Twitter yesterday:

“If I’m a co-author with an ‘equal contribution’ statement, is it okay to switch the place of my name and my co-author name on my CV?”

Usually, the discussion is about how swapped names might be interpreted by a potential CV reader. 

The general mood in responses is usually, “Don’t do it, because some readers will see this as shenanigans.” Everyone who has read a lot of CVs from students or early career researchers knows that some people try to “puff up” their credentials.* Readers do not appreciate that. 

It’s not even whether this counts as “lying.” Readers of CVs usually have a lot of CVs to assess, and it’s reasonable to be annoyed by CVs that make readers put in more mental effort recalibrating those inflated claims of accomplishments.

What I want to do, though, is flip the script. I don’t want to talk about how the reader might interpret re-arranging the order of names on a paper listed in a CV.  I want to ask why the author of the CV wants to switch the order of names.

It seems authors want to swap names because they think there is an advantage to doing so. They seem to think that putting their name first will be more assessed more positively.

If authors truly believed in that “equal contribution” statement, what is the point to changing the order of names? 

“Well, they are interchangeable” is not a good enough answer, because it’s easier to leave it than it is to change it. 

The desire to swap names shows that “equal contribution” or “co-first” footnotes are nearly meaningless in practice. Wanting to swap name order later indicates that you should have advocated for yourself harder before the paper was submitted to a journal.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe there are some other reasons that people want to swap name order on CVs.  

Maybe people think there is no way to show “equal contribution” on a CV? Sure there are. Here’s one.

Taffe M*, Faulkes Z*. 2022. Journal article title. Journal 3: 34-35.
* Equal contribution

Maybe people worry that their name will get lost in a long list of names? There are other ways to emphasize names beside order. Here’s one.

Taffe M, Faulkes Z. 2022. Journal article title. Journal 3: 34-35.

If we have a better handle on why people want to swap names, we might have better advice on how to create a CV that meets the author’s goal without annoying any readers.

* Like listing articles as “in preparation for Nature.” Sure, friend, we all have articles that we plan to submit to Nature.  Except we know there’s no way to verify it and most things that are submitted to Nature get rejected.

External links 

Co-first authorship is a lie and a sham and an embarrassment to our profession