Dear Marcel,

I get your point.

Authorship and co-authorship should apply to stricter rules... Thank you for your interesting question, that should arise important contributes from the scientific community.

Dear Marcel,

I get your point.

Authorship and co-authorship should apply to stricter rules... Thank you for your interesting question, that should arise important contributes from the scientific community.

Dear Marcel

Soon the first author as well as position will become irrelevant in the publication. I expect very soon we will ask authors to give detail about each authors contribution.

Please see http://www.nature.com/news/it-is-time-for-full-disclosure-of-author-contributions-1.11475

Not necessarily!

Author order must be according to contribution in the research. Data analysis does not mean that one knows the critical part of the research.

Some time researchers use commercial person for data analysis on payment basis.

Chief author of all articles and/or papers initiated!

Period!

This is not always done. In some places, a person is made first author thanks to his/her affiliations, connections, relations...(anything except science). Sometimes, persons are included as co-authors while they know nothing about the research done. Sometimes, 3 persons dig deep into literature to steal a paper; the one who does the biggest effort in changes of the paper, to look as if it is new, becomes first author (of course, not called top thief !). This whole business of publishing needs an overall modification, indeed. 

At least one of the authors of a publication should know the literature, but on the other hand why do you need to know the literature when publications are films or photos?

I think data analysis and interpretation is the most important, difficult and responsible part of the research. As for the background, theory analysis it's the most interesting analytical part.

Authorship Guidelines from Harvard

Many institutions and peer-reviewed journals, have established standards for authorship. These standards are similar on basic issues but are changing over time, mainly to take into account the growing proportion of research that is done by teams whose members have highly specialized roles.

In practice, various inducements have fostered authorship practices that fall short of these standards.

• Junior investigators may believe that including senior colleagues as authors will improve the credibility of their work and its chances of publication, whether or not those colleagues have made substantial intellectual contributions to the work.
• They may not want to offend their chiefs, who hold substantial power over their employment, research opportunities, and recommendations for jobs and promotion. 
• Senior faculty might wish to be seen as productive researchers even though their other responsibilities prevent them from making direct contributions to their colleagues' work. They may have developed their views of authorship when senior investigators were listed as authors because of their logistic, financial, and administrative support alone.

http://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/integrity-academic-medicine/hms-policy/faculty-policies-integrity-science/authorship-guidelines

From a sincere relation between authors, it is reasonable that the first author must be the one who has worked more, who gives the key idea to develop, who manages all the work until its publication.

I agree with Espejo's idea.

It is not true every time. Sometimes data analysis is more important and sometimes writing and interpretation is important.

if the person who analyzes the data has the most contribution, s/he should be the first author

Riesenberg and Lundberg [1] have made certain very important and simple suggestions to decide the sequence of authorship:

• The first author should be that person who contributed most to the work, including writing of the manuscript
• The sequence of authors should be determined by the relative overall contributions to the manuscript.
• It is common practice to have the senior author appear last, sometimes regardless of his or her contribution. The senior author, like all other authors, should meet all criteria for authorship.
• The senior author sometimes takes responsibility for writing the paper, especially when the research student has not yet learned the skills of scientific writing. The senior author then becomes the corresponding author, but should the student be the first author? Some supervisors put their students first, others put their own names first. Perhaps it should be decided on the absolute amount of time spent on the project by the student (in getting the data) and the supervisor (in providing help and in writing the paper). Or perhaps the supervisor should be satisfied with being corresponding author, regardless of time committed to the project.
• A sensible policy adopted by many supervisors is to give the student a fixed period of time (say 12 months) to write the first draft of the paper. If the student does not deliver, the supervisor may then write the paper and put her or his own name first.

1. Riesenberg D, Lundberg GD. The order of authorship: who’s on first? JAMA. 1990;264:1857. [PubMed]

Data analysis is a technical work and every body can't do.

Good data analysis and its anotation carries much work, but to take standard programs with indiscriminated data is a routine. I think the first place as author must be reserved to the most ethical and creative researcher.

Try to read this book.

Day, R.A. (1979), How to write and publish a scientific paper, ISI Press, Philadelphia.