We are examining authorship issues in an interdisciplinary settings (connected to gender) and I was wondering what is the level of prestige of the last author in different disciplines. I my area (political science) being the first author is usually the most prestigious position, although a lot of time authors are listed in alphabetical order. Recently I saw a paper in Nature that mentioned only the last author in the abstract and was wondering whether we should examine also the last authors in our analysis.
In nursing and health sciences, the authors are listed according to their contribution and in accordance with the guidelines of Committee of Publication Ethics. These guidelines state that the authors' contribution should be explicitly mentioned. The first author is usually the one with greatest contribution and the last author is the one who have overseed the whole project along with the first author.
In social sciences is the same, the order determine the contribution, in fact, in some Scopus journal ask about wich specif contribution each author made... There are many papers about this topic, even many jokes about it (talking about bad practices in this situation). I recommend you not to order in alphabetic order because in general is not de rule... I hope this could help you...
Alphabetic order works if all contributed equally. This can also be stated in the publication. It is super important to talk about this openly in the beginning of the project and also as it progresses as the situation may change and expectations differ. Many relations have been destroyed and a lot of hidden bitterness is created when these topics are no openly disccused and authorship is not perceived as fair. There is also quite a bit of abuse that is sort of a taboo in this field. I have interiewed junior scholars on their negative experienes with co-authoring, and they often bring up the hidden problems with authorship/power relations.
First and last authors are student and his /her mentor, respectively.
If there is no student involved in the research, the first author is the one who designed (and performed the some experiments) and wrote the manuscript.
If two authors equaly contributed to work, it is stated in the paper.
(speaking for Chemistry Science and my way of working with collaborators).
I just receive this information that could be usefull in this topic
https://www.lluiscodina.com/etica-publicacion-academica/
Is in Spanish but you can translate it... I hope will help you!
I read Wileidys' entry in full and found it helpful (copied the three basic sine-qua-non 'rules' below). However....
Thinking about my own experiences at least ( in the field of organization studies where the contribution and sometimes the whole study emerges gradually during the writing process), it may be contentious what a 'substantial contribution' implies and what ' important intellectual content' really means. It may mean many different things to different people in different fields and university cultures, especially when there are important hierarchical differences among the authors.
So best to talk about authorship openly at the beginnig and during each project. It is surprising how littlle there is open dicussion about this important topic in most universities & departments.
(Authorship credit should be based only on: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published.)
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