Authorship is important. It’s one of the primary mechanisms by which researchers get credit for the work they do. So, we need to ensure that our academic system of authorship is fair and that authors are accountable for their research outputs. To meet these goals, two basic rules are almost universally accepted by universities and publishers. An author of an academic publication must: 1. have made a scholarly contribution to the research, and 2. agree to be accountable. The point is that credit and accountability should go hand-in-hand. Only the people who actually did the work deserve to be authors, and those same people must be able and willing to take responsibility for its quality. Beyond those basic rules, authorship norms differ somewhat between disciplines. Read your local policies and understand the requirements of the journals in which you intend to publish. What about authorship order? The order of authorship can matter, since some positions (first author, last author) carry more prestige and credit. These norms differ quite substantially between academic disciplines. Discussions about order are hard. They can feel daunting, especially if there are power dynamics or if team members have different perspectives about their relative contributions. Here are some practical tips: - Discuss authorship early and often. Most disputes arise due to poor communication. - Understand disciplinary norms. Your collaborators may not share all of your own views about authorship, especially if they come from a different field or perhaps a different country. - Try to understand each person’s contribution to the research and the manuscript. You might like to use the CRediT taxonomy to list the kinds of contributions that will be made (or have been made) by each collaborator. Some journals use the CRediT format. (https://credit.niso.org/) - If you decide not to order by relative contribution, the group could agree to an alphabetical or random order. The contribution statement can describe what each person did. In some fields (e.g. mathematics), alphabetic ordering is common. - You could use an authorship "scorecard". For example, you could make a basic spreadsheet that lists research contributions down the side, and each contributor across the top. As a group, make a "score" for each person’s contribution to each component (search for examples online). If you still can’t agree, the group could ask a trusted third party to mediate. - Keep a record of what you’ve agreed. This could be a formal agreement, but it doesn't need to be in all cases. For example, it might just be a summary of what was agreed at a team meeting, emailed to all research team members. Consider that: - Authorship disputes are common. In one survey of 6,673 respondents, nearly half (46.6%) reported disagreements regarding authorship naming. (Smith, E., et al. 2019) - Sexism appears to bias authorship lists. "Even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions." (Chaoqun, N., et al. 2021) - Researchers often overestimate their own contribution to a research project. (Herz, N., et al. 2020)