outline.txt

Comedy paper for SIGTBD

Introduction
Mention supercollaboration, not having to worry about authorship order, no uncomfortable debates
Standard solutions: alphabetical order, "joint first author" footnote
Mention significance to being first author: X et al.
Workaround is to list all names, but hard for papers with lots of authors; cite 12- and 100-author examples
Studies about academics with earlier last names in economics
Reverse alphabetical on some papers (find an example, in theory?, to cite)

Solution: Superpose authors for true "no order", everyone can be first
X et al. -> XYZ superposed
Example papers cited (my own papers with 12+ authors, ChatGPT and human genome project with 100+)

Technology
How to do it in LaTeX, BibTeX, HTML
Hover tooltip in LaTeX PDF, HTML
Still readable when converted to ASCII, so e.g. Google Scholar / citeseer / researchgate will get it right?
Maybe include trailing comma for this?
Experiment with multiple colors, though all-black is probably "most fair" (no stacking order) 
Maybe colors + transparency with proper blending would order neutral?
Randomized ordering during compilation (nice for arXiv papers)
Black + transparency may work well
Different fonts better? Sans-serif? Thinner? Inverse proportional to number of authors?

Additional benefits:
Reduces number of pages in bibliography
Great for conference page limits
Also global warming (for people who print papers)

Paper itself has 2 authors, Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine