The first author should be
that person who contributed most to the work
, including writing of the manuscript. The sequence of authors should be determined by the relative overall contributions to the manuscript. It is common practice to have the senior author appear last, sometimes regardless of his or her contribution …
Authorship Standards. Authorship of a scientific or scholarly paper should be limited to
those individuals who have contributed in a meaningful and substantive way to its intellectual content
.
Everyone who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the work should
be an author. Everyone who has made other substantial contributions should be acknowledged. 3.
The author must have:
Contributed substantially to the conception and design of the study
, the acquisition of data, or the analysis and interpretation. Drafted or provided critical revision of the article. Provided final approval of the version to publish.
The most common way authors are listed is by relative contribution. The
author who most substantially worked on the draft article and the underlying research
becomes the first author. The others are ranked in descending order of contribution.
Who Is an Author? The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work
; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND.
Consulting the dictionary
As a verb,
author
is simply a more distinguished term for write. A writer can be anyone who writes anything. An author is a distinguished and professional writer who has published and sold their work.
Traditionally, the last author position is reserved for
the supervisor or principal investigator
. As such, this person receives much of the credit when the research goes well and the flak when things go wrong.
The
number of authors is unlimited in principal
. There are publications with dozens if not hundreds of authors in large international multi-institutional projects. But in the last past years more and more journals have limited the number of co-authors. Typically the limitation is six authors.
Thus, the first name in an author list is the most sought-after position in a scientific publication. … However, sometimes multiple authors may have contributed equally, in which case
the order of author names does not matter
, and you can inform the journal editor of this.
In many academic subjects, including the natural sciences, computer science and electrical engineering, the lead author of a research article is typically
the person who carried out the research and wrote
and edited the paper.
It’s always good to have another paper
, even if you are second author. A hiring or review committee may ask you to describe your own contribution to the paper. As long as you can do that honestly and point to some substantive contribution to the paper, it will be to your benefit.
Yes
, the author order is important. The author order is based on their contribution to the work.
The claim
is the author’s main argument—what the author wants you to do, think, or believe by the time you finish reading the text. The content is the evidence which provides the support and reasoning upon which the claim is built.
It depends on the field and on agreement between authors, but from career perspective it is better if a person has also sometimes been the first author (and in some fields, also published something alone), it
does not matter so much
if a person has mostly been a second or a third author.
Can anyone be an author? While
everyone can be considered a writer if they write
, not everyone can be considered an author. Typically, an author is someone who publishes their completed literary work (usually a book). The path to be an author lies in publishing a book or literary work.
