Author order is a pretty self-evident term. It simply describes the order in which authors appear on a publication. Who goes first, second and who is et al. Now author order might also seem like a pretty trivial topic. However, it sadly isn’t. And it might appear to be a straightforward process, but tussling over who goes first and who goes last has troubled many a research team.

Professional reputations, careers and funding opportunities may depend on whether people are listed as first author, and how often. These days, funding and promotion committees and reviewers tend to equate author order with the amount of work done on a project, and the level of contribution that a person has made to the field. So CVs and publication lists are generally carefully scrutinised for clues about performance. And the more papers you can list as a first or senior author tends to work in your favour. Always being at the tail end of a list of authors can raise questions about you and your work.

Is this right? Good? Proper? Well not really, given what often goes on when it comes to determining who goes where in a list of authors. And the issues don’t stop there.

It may also seem that attributing authorship is a matter of concern only in big teams and particularly in the sciences. This is not the case. While it is true that there is a lot of discussion about author order in the sciences, there can be a squabble about author order when there are only two or three people involved. And when the discipline is in the arts, humanities or social sciences.

You’d think that author order might be determined simply by the person who’s done the most work, or perhaps who’d written most of the paper. These are not necessarily the same person of course, and that is one point of potential difference of opinion. Which matters most? It also may be that the person who is the research leader goes first because, even if they’ve done little on the particular paper, there wouldn’t be a project or a paper without the work they put in designing the project, getting funding and managing it. Or should they go last?  There’s a potentially tricky discussion if the leader takes the view that they are entitled to be first regardless.And some even suggest that it is the first author who should take the responsibility for deciding author order.

Wait, there’s more. Even if you get the first author sorted, who gets to be “et al”? Does everyone else go in alphabetical order, or in order of the amount that they have contributed? Calculating the percentage of contribution can be pretty vexed even though it is now required by some audit and promotion systems. And what about the junior staff member(s) who have done a lot of the donkey work and may also have written a first draft? Do they automatically go last just because they are more junior?

Or should teams take into consideration individual need? Teams are not neutral territory and there are always power dynamics arising from seniority and permanency. What consideration will the team give to those members who are contracted or who are early in their career? Do more senior team members have duties of care to PhD/postPhDers on the team and what does that look like in relation to publication?

And is there a case that can be made for everyone on the team taking a turn at being first author?

And what about team members who make contributions that may not meet the criteria for authorship, but without whom the research could not proceed? Examples here include technical support. It is ethical to formally acknowledge this kind of work. Or perhaps the research has been dependent on the help of First Nations knowledge holders. It is important to acknowledge this debt, but also to get approval before explicitly naming any one or any community.

Let’s take an example of the number of authoring decisions that have to be made. The British Medical Journal lists authors´names at the beginning of the paper, then lists contributors (some of whom aren’t included as authors) at the end of the paper, giving details of who did what. They also list guarantors, people prepared to take public responsibility for the paper as a whole.

Well you can see that, far from being a straightforward matter, author order is actually potentially a very troubling area. And there are no right answers, or at least no agreed position in the wider scholarly community, to these issues. Because of this lack of consensus, the general advice is for a research team to discuss author order and associated issues early into a project. And to come to some kind of recorded agreement. Here is one version of advice from The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.

So is there advice on how to proceed? A little, but there’s no substitute for discussion.

If the research team wants to move away from a turn-taking or an alphabetical approach to author order, then there are two ways to proceed. The first is usually called relative contribution, and that’s where everyone just agrees on each contribution that has been made. The FATE framework  – fairness, accountability, transparency and effort – may be helpful in guiding any discussions about relative contribution.  (This paper is unfortunately paywalled but just knowing the criteria may help.) The second approach is via calculation – this is called a mathematical contribution. That’s where a percentage weighting is attached to each contribution.

In order to do either of these the team has to make a list of all the tasks related to the publication and then decide who has done how much of each one. It is important to understand, if doing this kind of calculation, that team members often have different roles and access to tasks and opportunities, team-work is by nature complementary. It is easy to confuse questions of access and effort when weighing up contributions and to downplay work that is not immediately and obviously related to writing.

I confess that calculating mathematical contribution always seems to me a bit like arguing over who drank most wine at dinner when it comes to paying the restaurant bill. However, if this is where the team is, then there are tools that can help – see for example this Open Access paper:

Martins, R.S., Mustafa, M.A., Fatimi, A.S. et al. The CalculAuthor: determining authorship using a simple-to-use, fair, objective, and transparent process. BMC Res Notes 16, 329 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-023-06597-4 

You may also find the CRediT website helpful – it’s a taxonomy of research tasks and supporting resources – it’s useful for determining the individual tasks undertaken and who did what.

The next post will discuss an even more vexed issue which affects many PhD and PostPhDers. And that’s when you’re on the team but you don’t get invited to coauthor.