Equal width author names reduce visual bias on academic papers
Truly Every Author is First Author: Equal-Width Superimposition by Minimising Visual Distortion
Digital Libraries
Summary
When many authors write a paper together, the first author's name usually stands out more, giving them an advantage. Previous attempts to put all author names in the exact same spot made the names look uneven and still favored the longest name visually. The authors found a way to stretch or squeeze each name so they all fit exactly the same width, balancing how they look. They backed this method with math, created packages for popular typesetting systems, and verified their proofs with a computer tool.
What this means in practice
- •For academic publishers: Create author blocks and bibliographies with visually balanced, equal-width names to remove order bias in multi-author papers.
- •For technical typesetters: Use the provided LaTeX and Typst packages to improve layout consistency when printing author names with varying lengths.
Authors
Peter Waldert, Benedikt Kantz, Thomas Köhler
Abstract
In an earlier work, Demaine and Demaine propose that every author be a first author by superimposing all author names on the same spot of the title page. The construction is typographically unstable, because names have different natural widths. The superimposed block is ragged and the longest name dominates the visual mass, reintroducing exactly the ordering advantage the standard removes. We close this loophole. Each name is distorted by two knobs, a horizontal glyph scale and an inter-letter tracking, until all names occupy one common width $W$. We give a quadratic distortion model, solve the per-name trade-off in closed form by Lagrange multipliers, and show that the total-distortion optimal common width is a stiffness-weighted mean of the natural widths. We provide implementations as a $\LaTeX$ package and a Typst package, covering author blocks and bibliography entries alike; this paper typesets its own author block and its own reference with the former. Every proposition is machine-checked in Lean. The $\LaTeX$ and Typst packages, as well as the proofs, are available at https://github.com/MrP01/EveryAuthorIsFirstAuthor.