Equality of et al - how about no one gets their names inserted into the paper, everyone is just put in the bibliography. No “first authors.” Instead, the institution gets the reference i.e. instead of (Miller et al 2005) it can be (Cornell U. et al 2005). Then, because it’s digital, mouse over the reference for a full list of people involved.
Solves the problem of worthless administration slapping their personal name on it.
The IEEE reference style guide actually often works just like this, the entire reference is just a number in brackets in the text and then the details of the reference is in the bibliography at the end. For example
...a high correlation as shown in [5]...
[5]A.N. Author, P. Ostdoc, and O. Verworked "A paper about a thing" Department, University, City, etc.
Same for ACM. I think it’s good as it’s easier to read. But sometimes I still write names (e.g. as Mueller et al. points out, the color blue is actually red [666]), to highlight something. But that’s maybe for 5 out of 100 sources.
Equality of et al - how about no one gets their names inserted into the paper, everyone is just put in the bibliography. No “first authors.” Instead, the institution gets the reference i.e. instead of (Miller et al 2005) it can be (Cornell U. et al 2005). Then, because it’s digital, mouse over the reference for a full list of people involved.
Solves the problem of worthless administration slapping their personal name on it.
The IEEE reference style guide actually often works just like this, the entire reference is just a number in brackets in the text and then the details of the reference is in the bibliography at the end. For example
...a high correlation as shown in [5]... [5] A.N. Author, P. Ostdoc, and O. Verworked "A paper about a thing" Department, University, City, etc.Same for ACM. I think it’s good as it’s easier to read. But sometimes I still write names (e.g. as Mueller et al. points out, the color blue is actually red [666]), to highlight something. But that’s maybe for 5 out of 100 sources.
This is the citation format that makes the most sense to me, especially now that you can just click
[5]and be brought straight to the bibliography.