I may be missing the point, but why not instead list names in whatever order, but clarify who contributed what.
Order matters in academia whether the authors want it to or not. Other academics will look at the order of the authors and make judgements based on that, so you’d have to specify something like “authors listed alphabetically”.
I honestly didn’t know if this was serious at first…
Edit: lol the fuck? It is real? When you hover, the tooltip is still a list with an order… what’s the point?
Not only is this paper real: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01393.pdf
But they actually made it practical:
We have implemented two ways to reveal the actual names present in an overlapping stack, when viewing a PDF file on a computer.
First, hovering over the stacked names should pop up a tooltip with the authors listed in their original order, as shown in Figure 1.
This feature works on many desktop PDF viewers (e.g., Acrobat, Evince, Firefox, VSCode), but notably not Chrome, Edge, Safari, or MacOS Preview. It also does not work on mobile devices we tested (probably because they lack a natural notion of “hovering”).
Hmm… it’s not working for me in either Firefox or Okular.
That doesn’t sound very practical at all.
All it’s done is force you to read a tooltip. Which is an awful idea. The tooltips still create a first-author situation, so now your forced to screw around with a tooltip for…. Nothing.
I mean, relatively practical. Just the fact that they actually made an effort. It’s not much different from having it in a footnote
