Student resources

  • After many months of work, you and your colleagues are ready to submit your research paper to an academic journal.

  • But who should be named as an author on the paper? And in what order?

    Understanding the norms around authorship and how to talk about authorship issues openly and comfortably is critically important for you as a student and early career researcher.

  • The individual who has secured funding for a research project and is usually identified as such on grant proposals in sponsored research. This term is sometimes used to describe an individual who leads a research project even if the research project is not sponsored by external funding. This person(s) is often the first or last author on publications, but position may vary by discipline.

  • A highly valued position in many disciplines because of the associated visibility when the work is referenced (e.g., Jones et al., 2021). The author in this position is typically considered the “lead” author—the one who made the most contributions on a given work.

  • Any author who has taken a prominent role in generating research ideas, conducting research, and drafting a manuscript. (More than one person may hold this position on a research project.)

  • The meaning of this position varies across disciplines. It may be reserved for the supervisor/ principal investigator (PI) involved in directing the project (e.g., in the life sciences, often reserved for the faculty member in whose lab the work was conducted who may also serve as the corresponding author). In other disciplines, this position may be filled by the member who made the smallest contribution to the project.

  • This position refers to the person who is responsible for communicating between the publisher and collaborators on projects that have been submitted for publication. In some disciplines, this person may be the first author; in others, they may be the principal investigator (PI) and/or the last author. After publication, the person in this role handles media inquiries, requests for data or materials, and other future questions that come to light (for example, regarding mistakes).

Common Authorship Terms

Determining Author Order

Disciplines have different conventions for determining authorship order. These may be written or unwritten practices.

Different practices across disciplines can lead to conflicts, particularly when research teams are large, interdisciplinary, or international. 

  • Some disciplines assign author order alphabetically by authors’ last names. This is a common practice in business research. Other disciplines in which author lists are very long may also use this convention. For instance, high-energy particle physics and large-scale genomics research may rely on alphabetical order to list those that contributed to the work. A 2015 physics paper broke records for having over 5,000 authors!

  • Because they are coveted order positions, sometimes collaborators who feel they contributed equally to a work will share a first-author or last-author designation. You’ll often see this designated with an asterisk next to the authors’ names and a note explaining the shared assignment. Authorship order can also be negotiated among collaborators. Two Principal Investigators (PIs) who collaborate often may decide to trade off who is the last, senior author on publications.

  • Some disciplines assign author order based on individuals’ relative contributions, from largest contribution (first author) to smallest contribution (last author). Some disciplines, particularly in the sciences, modify this convention by reserving the last author slot for the project’s lead principal investigator.

Download our resource guide for making authorship decisions in collaborative projects.

This includes an Authorship Agreement that you can use to document authorship-related decisions made over the course of the project. 

Review this case study for help in thinking about how to handle complex authorship situations.