There are lots of distressed co authors out there who were promised equal credit but didn't get it in the end, and some were promised 2nd co author but found themselves listed as 3rd or even 4th. An interesting point is many new writers ( new to academe) don't know what kind of work generally merits credit for publications. Another problem lies in the order in which co-authors are listed. its commonly assumed that journals list authors in order of the perceived dominance of the author so 1st author has the highest credit. However on an hindsight even the best academic brains cannot put a formula to compare the relative values of physical, intellectual and practical contributions to these papers. So in case of your own institution when it comes to rewards or points or scores, how do they evaluate the co authors?
A wide-spread method is to list all authors in alphabetic order, or to put the author who wrote down the results and managed the publication to the first place and list all other authors in alphabetic order.
My college considers all co-authors to be equal contributors, up to a limit of 4. That limit is discipline specific, and another discipline is likely to have a different threshold for counting a contribution.
In my experience, co-authors are decided before the submission of a paper. Two consideration for ordering co-authors includes: the originator of the ideas or data, or one of the authors name is well-known and will most likely get the manuscript through the gatekeeper of the journal. So it seem just that the name that appears first might be given more weight in the rank order.
Here is a problem I encountered with a editor on a manuscript that we published. The editor was having some problems with some of the materials. The editor asked us to state who wrote what part of the manuscript. We replied that we have a 50:50 sharing of the work. This is my view of equal contribution.
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