Every now and then, one sees in mathematical papers appendices, authored by person(s) different from the authors of the main body of the paper.
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What is the rationale behind such appendices? In most of the cases I have seen, it can be a bona fide short separate paper (granted, tight closely to the main paper in question, but many papers are tight closely to each other).
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What is the complete list of authors of a paper with an appendix? I belong to the school of thought claiming that references should be given according to the first letters of authors names. Each time, when citing a paper with appendix, I am agonizing over whether the authors of the appendix should be included or not in this abbreviation. More seriously, if a person is a (co)author of such an appendix (but not of the main body of the paper), how it is reflected in his list of publications?
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My impression is that the number of such appendices has been increased drastically in the recent years. Is it true? If yes, what may be reason(s) for that?
Edit May 27, 2011: DamienC made an interesting (and looking plausible to me) suggestion that the purported recent increase of separately-authored appendices is a way to cope with no longer fully adequate convention of authors ordering. If so, it would be interesting to compare with how the things evolved, say, in life sciences, from the situation where coauthors were not acceptable – a situation, as far as I understand, common to all scientific papers at the beginning of XX century – till today ugly state of affairs with convoluted and self-contradictory rules who goes first, who goes last, how the authors should be clustered, etc. This may suggest that in mathematics things evolve in a different direction, which, though not perfect, is sort of reassuring.
2nd edit May 27, 28 2011. My question is not about appendices in general, including differences in various subjects and subcultures (for example, in statistics it is common to defer all proofs to appendices) — this is an entirely different topic. My question is about the sutuation when the set of the authors of an appenix is different from the set of the authors of the main paper — and, bibliographic (and bibliometric, and social, if you wish) difficulties (or at least what I see as bibliographic, etc. difficulties) arising from such situations. Sorry if that was not clear enough from the first place.
Best Answer
I can't resist mentioning the following paper of mine: Random diophantine equations, B. Poonen and J. F. Voloch, pp. 175–184 in: Arithmetic of higher-dimensional algebraic varieties, B. Poonen and Yu. Tschinkel (eds.), Progress in Math. 226 (2004), Birkhäuser.
It has two appendices, one by Colliot-Thélène and the other by Katz. The first appendix, by Colliot-Thélène, proves a result we quote, which he had proved many years before but never published. This proof required a variant of "weak Lefschetz" for which there was no reference. Katz supplied a proof that ended up being the second appendix which, strictly speaking, is an appendix to the first appendix!