Hi Michale,

This is from the ORI on the responsible conduct of research. In additions, there are tools to determine (calculate) the order of authors, but I have not seen anyone using those tools.

http://ori.hhs.gov/education/products/RCRintro/c09/1c9.html

"As with the principle of contribution, however, there are no clear rules for determining who should be listed as first author or the order in which other authors should be listed. The ICMJE Requirements simply note that:

The order of authorship on the byline should be a jointdecision of the coauthors. Authors should be preparedto explain the order in which authors are listed. "

@Janos:

"Corresponding or primary author. Many journals now require one author, called the corresponding or primary author, to assume responsibility for all aspects of a publication, including:

the accuracy of the data,

the names listed as authors (all deserve authorship and no one has been neglected),

approval of the final draft by all authors, and

handling all correspondence and responding to inquiries.

In accepting this responsibility, corresponding authors should take special note of the fact that they are acting on behalf of their colleagues. Any mistakes they make or fail to catch will affect their colleagues’ as well as their own careers."

Bests,

Rolando

I think there are two people who get the more credit for any academic article, the first author and the corresponding author. Others will get credit (ofcourse less than the first author and the corresponding author) according to their order of appearance on the paper..

In my country (Hungary), grant evaluation guidelines rarely distinguish between first, last and second authors's importance: If there is no explicit authors's statement presented, they simply give each 50-50, or 30-30-30% percent of the credit. For research and teaching jobs, sometimes it is asked to differenciate our publications by a single authored-first authored-other schema.

I think that in an international environment, the author's importance can not be evaluated only by looking at the author order before the title. The author's statement (to be supplied to every multi-authored article and appearing usually at the beginning or at the end of the publication) should also be consulted, as it often provides decisive information, f.e., about co-first authorship, or ranking between authors appearing in the title in alphabetical order.

Also i think that "corresponding author" is a purely administrative title.

In India also, funding agencies dont ask for a separate list. However, the differentiation comes when applying for a teaching/research position.

I do however disagree with Janos's remark that corresponding author is just a administrative title. In most scientific publications/literature, the corresponding author is usually the one who is credited with coming up with the research idea and the first author is the person who mainly worked on executing that idea.

Hi Michale,

This is from the ORI on the responsible conduct of research. In additions, there are tools to determine (calculate) the order of authors, but I have not seen anyone using those tools.

http://ori.hhs.gov/education/products/RCRintro/c09/1c9.html

"As with the principle of contribution, however, there are no clear rules for determining who should be listed as first author or the order in which other authors should be listed. The ICMJE Requirements simply note that:

The order of authorship on the byline should be a jointdecision of the coauthors. Authors should be preparedto explain the order in which authors are listed. "

@Janos:

"Corresponding or primary author. Many journals now require one author, called the corresponding or primary author, to assume responsibility for all aspects of a publication, including:

the accuracy of the data,

the names listed as authors (all deserve authorship and no one has been neglected),

approval of the final draft by all authors, and

handling all correspondence and responding to inquiries.

In accepting this responsibility, corresponding authors should take special note of the fact that they are acting on behalf of their colleagues. Any mistakes they make or fail to catch will affect their colleagues’ as well as their own careers."

Bests,

Rolando

Milian; thank you for explaining the role of the corresponding author. However for me, it is close to unacceptable that this system provide opportunity to any author except the first/corresponding one to NOT claim responsibility for a publication he or she worked on. This is why author's statements tends to enumerate explicitely the part of the work a specific author is responsible for, and end with a statement like "...all authors claim full responsibility for this article". Except for a few cases (like those particle physics articles with 2-300 authors) this seems to be a better practice than putting the burden of claiming responsibility to one author.

It was once explained to me - by an academic - that academic papers should list authors alphabetically by surname or family name unless there was a compelling reason not to. For example, authors agree to put the name of the author who made the most substantial contribution first. If names do not appear in alphabetical order this indicated a greater contribution from the first author.

Whose name should go first on an academic paper?

Academic papers are the currency of academia, but with teamwork the norm in many fields, who has a rightful claim to be included as an author - and what should the all-important order be? In the 30 November edition of Times Higher Education, reporter Holly Else surveys academics on the theory and the sometimes rather less ethical practice of academic authorship...

This article will apear on November 30th!

http://view.mail.tesglobal.com/?qs=507cff9f78c814a09a7d10b2ab774bcff5a03df45ccd5d75bcc3670d3b3b452cc4958d4573671f54ba66a05f0829919503e27fdb2b3f42ae9dbc85954ad928a513c82b9f9d1af28b

Regarding Matt Holland answer: sticking to the alphabetic order of authors appears to be fairly common in pure maths. However, many other fields (e.g. biology and life sciences in general) do not seem to follow this tradition.

What would be helpful is to know who really contributed, and who is the friend of one who really contributed. This information isn't available in the order of the authors, but is an open secret.