steering the authorship

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Steering the Authorship

 

“Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you,
while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.”

 

― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

 

Include rather than exclude.

 

Authorship on peer-reviewed papers is the currency of academia, so who is and is not on a paper, and the order thereof, can be a sensitive topic. Leaving someone off authorship who should have (or thinks they should have) been can be a relationship-killing activity. Depending who that non-author is, it can be career-killing. The worst situation I have been in was when a co-worker and I agreed to write a paper with a higher up for all three of us to co-author for a peer-reviewed journal. The co-worker and I wrote the paper, sent it to the higher-up, and—while we waited several months for feedback—finally saw the paper published in the journal without our names attached. Ouch.

Unfortunately, there are no agreed-upon rules for authorship, and the expectations vary by discipline, institution, nation of origin, and personal ethics. My advice is to err on the side of inclusiveness. In other words, if you don’t know whether or not Person X should or should not be on the paper, ask Person X and happily accept their answer. A colleague once said that she invited a pre-reviewer of a paper to be a co-author after a really good review.

Generally, the person who did the most writing or organized the writing process will be listed as the first author. If there’s about an equal contribution, then who’s on first may become a process of wills. A more senior author may defer to the more junior author since first authorship is more important to a junior author than a senior author. For research with students, advisors generally push the student’s name to the beginning. Lately, the practice in some specialties is for the advisor to be listed last regardless of how many other co-authors there are. More lately, the “corresponding author” has more cachet. For master’s students, the advisor is generally tagged as the “corresponding author.” For Ph.D. students, the student is generally tagged as the corresponding author (and listed first).

The order of middle authors can get touchy. One method is to simply list them alphabetically. For large numbers of middle-authors, the alphabetical approach is generally used. Another method is to weigh each person’s contributions and order them from largest to smallest contribution. The problem here is that the weight of each person’s contribution is subjective, thus creating “Wait! I contributed more than that a-hole!” discussions from small-minded co-authors.

If there are two authors, a second author may protest (transparently or not) against adding a third since the resulting citation would change from Abbott and Costello (2024) to Abbott and others (2024).

 Some journals these days require a list of what each author contributed to the study. One way of doing this is through CRediT (Contribution Roles Taxonomy) [now that’s a painful backronym!]. Under this schema, the contribution of each auther is specified, such as conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, visualization, writing, and reviewing and editing, among others (CRT 2025).

If you used artificial intelligence for writing, data collection, analysis, or figure generation, it should be noted in the methods section or the acknowledgments.

It’s a good idea to establish authorship principles before doing the work and writing the paper or report.

 

CRT (Contributor Role Taxonomy), 2025, Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT): https://credit.niso.org/, accessed April 28, 2025.

 

 

 

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