There are usually some controversies or contentions particularly with whom first author, corresponding author and last author should be. While some institutions only reckon first author for full score during evaluation, other positions are not 'so' countenanced.
This authors positioning becomes major subject of controversies especially when supervisor is not yet a full grade professor. While corresponding author sometimes design the research and provides intellectual supervision, s/he losses some percentage during evaluations for not being the first author based on some institutional disposition.
Is there really a global standard with respect to authors' positioning on manuscript?
The widely accepted principle is that author order is according to substantive contribution to the particular paper. This includes the main idea, design of the study, determining what statistics to run, positioning the paper, and writing. That is not always easy to determine, and people might disagree as to whose contribution was most. Many people consider the writer as the lead on the paper and take first authorship on that paper. In many fields the last author position is given to the most senior person on the team. This might be the professor with students, or a full professor with junior faculty. When this is done, the senior person isn't usually writing the paper. What should not occur is that the senior person (faculty with students, senior faculty with junior faculty) automatically take first authorship--that should be based on contribution to the paper. This is an area where exploitation can occur.
I think it differs in different areas of science. My husbant is a researcher in agriculture, and they always put the largest contributor to the article to the last position, while we in marketing and social science put the major contributor at first place.
Now, in very high ranked journals, the author contributions in the manuscript are specified and detailed at the end as an essential rubric.
If I write 'jointly' authored papers, they are usually with one or maybe two co-authors. If contribution is roughly similar, then we list authors alphabetically. If there is an 'obvious' (and agreed) lead author, then that person is the 'lead (first) author. Two further points - 1) I don't make contributions to papers with 'many' other authors, and 2) my institution is not bothered where I am in the author 'pecking list'...
I know in the UK two authors from the same institution cannot claim the same paper - they have to agree who takes it or take 'half each'. This does not happen in the USA - or at least not in my institution...
In Brazil, for example, most of the job opennings in federal universities for professors, you get the full score for each publication if you are the first author, or 1/3 if you are not (some of them don't even count). The patterns that i've been followed is: First author to the main contributor, last author to the most senior or expert person on the team (or the supervisor) and the middle author for everyone else who contributed. This pattern can be seem here in Brazil, but i do not think that is global, depends on many factors that can be researched.
Some areas have already defined standards, such as in the field of medicine, for example: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html
But, I do not know any general pattern for all areas, even though in some fields the number of authors in the same study is very large.
From the responses so far, there seems to be no specific standard globally acceptable. While alphabetical listing would always shortchange some authors (like Zac, Zee ...) deciding the weight of contribution of some co-author is not always easy since each author rank his/her own contribution important.
Does that really implies that corresponding author does not have better scoring than other 'non-first authors'?
I generally agree with Paul Spector's answer above. In Computer Science, the first author is the author who has contributed the most. In Chemistry and Biochemistry, however, the last author is usually the most prominent...
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