A few years ago I wrote a post arguing that it is time to end ordered authorship. However that time has not yet arrived, and it appears that it is unlikely to arrive anytime soon. In the meantime, if one is writing a paper with 10 authors, a choice for authorship ordering and equal contribution designation must be made from among the almost 2 billion possibilities (1857945600 to be exact). No wonder authorship arguments are commonplace! The purpose of this short post is to explain the number 1857945600.

At first glance the enumeration of authorship orderings seems to be straightforward, namely that in a paper with n authors there are n! ways to order the authors. However this solution fails to account for designation of authors as “equal contributors”. For example, in the four author paper Structural origin of slow diffusion in protein folding, the first two authors contributed equally, and separately from that, so did the last two (as articulated via a designation of “co-corresponding” authorship). Another such example is the paper PRDM/Blimp1 downregulates expression of germinal center genes LMO2 and HGAL. Equal contribution designations can be more complex. In the recent preprint Connect-seq to superimpose molecular on anatomical neural circuit maps the first and second authors contributed equally, as did the third and fourth (though the equal contributions of the first and second authors was distinct from that of the third and fourth). Sometimes there are also more than two authors who contributed equally. In SeqVis: Visualization of compositional heterogeneity in large alignments of nucleotides the first eight authors contributed equally. A study on “equal contribution” designation in biomedical papers found that this type of designation is becoming increasingly common and can be associated with nearly every position in the byline.

To account for “equal contribution” groupings, I make the assumption that a set of authors who contributed equally must be consecutive in the authorship ordering. This assumption is certainly reasonable in the biological sciences given that there are two gradients of “contribution” (one from the front and one from the end of the authorship list), and that contributions for those in the end gradient are fundamentally distinct from those in the front. An authorship designation for a paper with n authors therefore consists of two separate parts: the n! ways to order the authors, and then the $2^{n-1}$ ways of designating groups of equal contribution for consecutive authors. The latter enumeration is simple: designation of equal authorship is in one-to-one correspondence with placement of dividers in the n-1 gaps between the authors in the authorship list. In the extreme case of placement of no dividers the corresponding designation is that all authors contributed equally. Similarly, the placement of dividers between all consecutive pairs of authors corresponds to all contributions being distinct. Thus, the total number of authorship orderings/designations is given by $n! \cdot 2^{n-1}$. These numbers also enumerate the number of ways to lace a shoe. Other examples of objects whose enumeration results in these numbers are given in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences entry for this sequence (A002866). The first twenty numbers are:

1, 4, 24, 192, 1920, 23040, 322560, 5160960, 92897280, 1857945600, 40874803200, 980995276800, 25505877196800, 714164561510400, 21424936845312000, 685597979049984000, 23310331287699456000, 839171926357180416000, 31888533201572855808000, 1275541328062914232320000.

In the case of a paper with 60 authors, the number of ways to order authors and designate equal contribution is much larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Good luck with your next consortium project!