Order of authors of a scientific paper signals the level of contribution each author made to the paper. If you are first author in the order of authors, it can be very prestigious. The further down you go in the order of authors, the less prestige. This is why it is not uncommon for scientific author groups to devolve into heated arguments over authorship order – usually after the manuscript is written.
The saying, “Good fences make good neighbors” means that having clearly marked boundaries can lead to better relationships. So as long as you are direct and honest (while also being polite and diplomatic), you can prevent many of these disagreements before they happen.
Order of Authors: Tips for Determining Order
Academic papers have been written on how to determine order of authorship, but I have some simple rules I follow that I will lay out here.
- The first author should be whoever’s idea the paper or study was that the paper is reporting about – even if they didn’t do a lot of the writing on the paper. It was their idea, so they should get credit for it. Often, this is the principal investigator of the study, but it doesn’t have to be.
- If there is a statistical analysis included in the paper, and the analyst is not already the first author, they should be second author.
- If the first author had someone else write the main first draft, that person should then be the third author.
- Anyone who actually wrote parts of the paper who are not in the author list yet should come next.
- Finally, anyone who edited the paper, reviewed the paper to give feedback, or contributed references to be cited in the paper should come after that.
- Anyone who did not contribute to the paper should not be an author. If you feel someone deserves some credit but they did not actually contribute to the paper, thank them in the acknowledgement section of the paper for what they actually did (e.g., helping with institutional agreements, doing data collection, technical support, etc.).
Figuring Out the Order of Authors, and Writing it Down
Before I actually write a paper, I get together a writing group including anyone planning to write on the paper or do any analysis included in the paper. We make a plan about who will write the first draft, and then send it around for editing. Since this usually happens in an online meeting, at that point, I share my screen, open a Word document, and start writing down what we are planning. Have you ever heard about setting up a written “authorship agreement” before actually writing the paper? It’s a good idea, and this is one way to do it.
It is at this point I also ask everyone to decide on the authorship order, and write it down for everyone to see. We also make a list of journals were are planning to target, as well as any other decisions we make about the paper. This is also a good time to talk about how you will split any authorship fees, and whether or not your team wants to pay for open access publishing. (I encourage everyone to publish open access if possible, because it increases the rate of your paper being cited by others.)
I have often run into the problem where one of the authors wants to add an author who literally has nothing to do with the paper or the study we are writing about. They all have personal reasons for this – the person is the leader of their lab, or a former professor, or a friend who did them a favor, etc. If a person wants to list themselves as an author on a paper they literally had nothing to do with, they are a grifter, and you don’t want to be involved with them.
Never share authorship with someone who is known to be a grifter, or anyone with a reputation for plagiarism, scientific misconduct, or other types of professional misbehavior. You do not want to put your reputation at stake by being in the same author list as them. If your co-author continues to push to add a grifter, just bow out of the writing team. It isn’t worth it to continue, because publishing papers is a long, drawn-out process of going back and forth with the reviewers, and if you have a grifter author and another author defending them, dealing with all this is not worth the headache.
As a side note, many journals ask you to report what role each author played in developing the manuscript as part of manuscript submission. This is by way of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT), which was established just for this purpose. There are 14 official author roles, and authors can serve more than one role. I encourage you to read the CRediT web page and become familiar with the different roles.
Adding Authors: Do’s and Don’ts
Sometimes, after we write the draft, we realize we are missing some expertise. It is at that time we can invite other authors to read the paper, give us feedback we will incorporate, and share in our authorship. To make this change, it is a good idea to have a meeting of the existing authors, during which you can open up the existing “authorship agreement” you have written and add to it.
All the authorship changes should happen before you submit the paper to the journal. This is because once you submit it, you are not really allowed to change authors or rearrange the order of authorship. Journals get really freaked out if you do this, and you have to beg them to let you.
Most journals explain in their “instructions to authors” that basically say you are not allowed to change authorship after you submit the paper. However, if your reviewers give you a lot of crap about your manuscript, and you think adding an author who can provide you professional guidance will help you solve their issues, it isn’t a bad idea. As an example, I have seen author teams who botch their statistics add a statistician author after getting a lot of crap from reviewers. While adding an author after the fact is better than just struggling through the mountain of criticism you are getting without the expertise to address it, it’s best to know your limits and figure out your team has a deficit before you submit the manuscript – not after you get piled on by reviewers.
What About the “Corresponding Author”?
Any of the authors can be the “corresponding author” – it doesn’t matter where they fall on the authorship list. It’s best to choose a corresponding author who has a lot of strong technical expertise when dealing with the online journal submission portals. This person should be ready and willing to serve as an interface between the author group and the journal editor and reviewers. They should be willing to make an account on the journal submission portal, upload all the files necessary, and fill in all the required information.
If there is someone on your authorship list who is very good at reading the “instructions for authors” and making sure the manuscript format meets the requirements, that person will likely make an optimal corresponding author. This person will be the first to hear when there is progress on the review of your paper, and should coordinate putting together the response to reviewers and the manuscript edits. They don’t have to do them, they just have to coordinate the group to ensure the work gets done and resubmitted on time.
Is there any advantage to being corresponding author? More recently, I’ve heard that academics can get points toward tenure for serving as corresponding author. Also, the corresponding author’s e-mail is usually listed as a contact on published articles, so this can elevate their status. Also, they are more likely to be suggested by other authors as a potential reviewer.
More Tips on Order of Authors
An ideal maximum for the number of authors, in my opinion, is five. Some bigger projects may legitimately include more than five authors, because they all did some work on the project. But honestly, this is rare. On a normal paper, seven should be the absolute maximum acceptable. Otherwise, it will look like you are just padding the authorship with friends who did not really contribute to the paper, and that’s a bad look.
I understand that some institutions reward authors for publishing single-authored papers. Usually, this is in the form of a point system, where points are shared across authors, so having a single-authored paper gains you the most points. Nevertheless, single-authored papers are a terrible idea. First, no one is perfect. You need the other authors to try to catch weaknesses, flaws, or holes in your paper and patch them up before they get to the reviewers.
Secondly, reviewers also are not perfect. If there are weaknesses, flaws or holes in your paper that get past reviewers, and the paper gets published, you might turn into a target. You could be attacked in letters to the editor of the journal and on social media. This can happen even if you are not publishing a single-authored paper – but in that case, you have a whole team working together to defend your work. If it’s you alone, you are left to defend yourself.
I would never allow myself to be in that position. It’s better to have at least one co-author on every paper, and share the points. You can make up for it by writing more papers, which is better for your career anyway.
Have you ever had an argument over authorship order on a paper? Tell us in the comments what happened, and how you resolved it.
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