How about specifying the relative contribution of each author and co-author right on the FrontPage or at least at the end of the paper on the day of publication.?

In broader sense it is possible , the main author could acknowledge the support rendered by his co-authors on the last page of the paper (preparing manuscript and developing mathematical model and so on).

The question is, the co-authors who are superior to main author will allow him to do so?. In this case, it is not possible to judge who contributed how much.

Dear Jerin Leno, your are hitting exactly the matter of conflict the subordinated scientific co-workers are in. And here is where Superiors would be required to provide a reasonable Evaluation about their contribution. In many countries the national science organisations established codes of scientific honesty conduct, but unfortunately this seems to be still often not that seriously considered by the superiors in Terms of their realistic contribution or co-authorship of a scientific paper.

Dear Ruediger, when researcher is going to submit PhD thesis for defence in the Ukraine, he has to agree his personal contribution with every co-author in his list of publications which are may be dated years ago. That is special "Document about personal contribution" among others required, where every co-author make sign. Frequently, that is formally composed document and co-authors come to agreement in formulations which are more required for PhD pretender. However, some times I noted that such practice could be really useful right within publication to avoid conflicts between co-authors especially of the same range (not Superiors).

Yes, I do agree, that the question of contribution to a mutual publication and the order of the names on the paper can be also a Problem between co-authors of the same rank. The important or interesting question here is to quantify the contribution of everyone, which can be important for later Evaluations (scholarships, Research fundings, scientific recognition, ...) as I know from experience. Then Referees are looking on papers with many co-authors or a list on which a superior is almost always on first place of the authors list and try to find out about the contribution of the applicant. I am sure there is a lot of guesswork, "reading between the lines" and uncertainty about how to judge the contribution later, even retrospectively.

Dear Ruediger, Your raise an excellent point. I seem to recall that in good medical journals ( I am a lowly engineer) each author is required to state their contribution in a brief paragraph as to what they actually did, Things that don't qualify for authorship include (for example) supplying patients and supplying funding, after all the lead investigator may only be acting as an intermediary, swapping the funding over from say Government paperwork to Research institute paperwork.

As far as the intellectual content goes that is also very hard to determine because of the interdependancy that goes on. Its rather as if the coach, dietician, masseur and sponsor got their names on the gold medal when really only one person did the bulk of the running - an over simplification I admit. Boy will they bleat when their name gets struck out! The hard reality is you need to do detailed diligence on a particular piece of work and try asking pointed questions about the reference material, how the experiments were conducted and the data analysed, does the name have a track record in the area or are they just blagging it. Sadly its now getting to the stage where vast numbers of semi-faked publications are flooding the archive where I assure you some of the "authors" have not even READ the material never mind wrote it. Hopefully some reputations will be destroyed by faked data (or faked anything else) which will make some of the ghost, or guest authors a little more reticent about adding their names onto work of unknown provenance. That would be really funny. Err my name goes on if its good but if it turns out later to be dodgy, can I take my name off? Sorry no deal. Bring it on.

Colin

Thanks to all contributors, I am a bit sad to notice the rather small number of contributions. I hoped to Launch somehting which may serve as a Basis for more fairly concideration of authership. It seems as if there is little interest on all sides, maybe for different reasons. Howerever I am happy to say that I had some Superiors in the past how wouldn't mind about pointing out the contributions or refusing coauthorship because of their lack of contribution.