If you’ve ever stared at the author order of a research paper and wondered who did what, or where your name might go, you’re not the first person! Academic authorship can feel confusing and, at times, downright political.
Who gets listed, in what order, and why? And what is the meaning behind terms like co-author and corresponding author?
These authorship decisions can have a big impact on your academic career – both during your PhD and beyond.
In this post we’ll demystify how authorship works, explore why it matters, and I’ll share some tips for how you can ensure you get the credit you deserve.
What is Research Paper Author Order All About?
As you’ll be aware, in academia research is typically shared through peer-reviewed papers. And the people who contribute to such papers are listed as authors. Author order therefore simply means the convention used to decide who appears first, in the middle, and last in the list of authors on a research paper.
Seems simple, right? However, unfortunately it can get a bit more complicated.
Authorship is about recognising the people who made meaningful contributions to the research: whether through designing the study, collecting data, running analysis, writing the manuscript, or all of the above.
But even deciding who gets listed as an author for a paper can become political, since there often isn’t a clear (and consistent) threshold. And then there can be the issue of deciding which order the authors will be listed which is also an important consideration.
If you’ve never been part of the academic publishing process before, it can seem like a bit of a minefield. And yes, sometimes it feels mysterious and unnecessarily pedantic. But it’s also something that can have a huge influence on your academic visibility and success.
By the end of this post you’ll hopefully understand the system and know how to ensure that your contributions are recognised appropriately.
Why Academic Authorship Matters
Academic authorship matters because it’s the primary way researchers get credit for their work.
The papers that people are listed as authors on get featured on their CV/resume, as well as online in places such as Google Scholar. Not listed as an author on a paper? You can’t really claim credit for it.
Why Authorship Order Matters
The authorship order gives a very rough way for people to understand at a glance how much a researcher contributed to a piece of work. It certainly isn’t perfect, as we’ll come on to, but it is a good initial indicator as to whether someone was the driving force for a piece of work or had more modest contributions.
The author order on the front of a research paper can affect everything from job offers and funding applications to Nobel prizes! After all, why not dream big!
Testament to this was a recent article in Nature, suggesting a weighting for how much credit authors should get for their papers depending on their authorship position.
If you’re a PhD student, authorship is especially important, as in some universities you’re required to publish a certain number of “first-author” papers before you can submit your thesis. As we’ll cover in a moment, being “first author” simply means that your name is the first to appear in the list and is generally where the person who did most of the work is listed.
Even if your university doesn’t have a formal publishing requirement, having first-author papers on your CV can make a big difference when applying for academic jobs. While for those destined for industry being first author still helps to demonstrate that you led the work and shows that you can independently design and complete projects.
That said, one of the most rewarding parts of a PhD can also be collaborating and working on side projects with other researchers. These kinds of opportunities can lead to middle-author positions, where you’re not leading the work but still contributing meaningfully.
Either way, understanding how academic authorship works, and what your position in the author list means, is essential. Let’s now cover it in more detail.
Academic Authorship Variations by Field
It’s worth noting that the ordering structure I’m going to be referring to is the most common practice in research papers within STEM and life science fields, but it can differ in others.
In some humanities disciplines, authorship is alphabetical or based purely on contribution without hierarchical implications. While in mathematics and economics, alphabetical authorship is also the norm regardless of contribution.
Research Paper Author Order Explained
Understanding research paper author order helps you interpret what each position actually signals about contribution and responsibility.
Let’s break down what author order typically looks like and explore the meaning behind terms such as first authors, co-authors, last authors and corresponding authors on research papers.
Understanding Author Order: First Author, Co-Author & Last Author
Understanding these roles makes author order much easier to interpret.
First Author (Lead Author)
It probably won’t come as a surprise that first (or lead) authors are the ones who lead a piece of work. In most cases, they’ll be the ones who did the majority of the hands-on research and writing.
Provided they’ve led the work from start to finish, PhD students are almost always first authors for work revolving around their PhD project. Being first author signals ownership, independence, and leadership of the research.
Last Author
The final author is often the senior academic who oversaw the work. This will commonly be a professor, lab head, or PhD supervisor. They may not have put in the same hours as the lead author, but they often secured the funding, guided the research direction, and supported the team strategically.
In many fields, being last author is seen as a mark of seniority and leadership.
Any other co-authors
The authors listed in the middle are co-authors who contributed in meaningful but usually more limited ways. For example, they might have provided access to a dataset, helped with statistical analysis, advised on methods, or supported with revisions.
Sometimes you won’t have more than two authors: just the first and last authors (or you could even just have one author). Other times there’ll be lots of co-authors. The first paper from my PhD had eight authors in total.
A co-author is different from someone listed in the acknowledgements: they’ve contributed significantly enough to be credited as part of the research team. Generally speaking, the closer a name is to the start or end of the list, the bigger the contribution.
To illustrate this, here are two examples from work I was involved with during my own PhD.
Example Paper 1
In this first example I am listed as the second author, having helped with this study but not led it. The work was led by another PhD student, Saman, and therefore he is the first author. Saman’s two PhD supervisors/advisors are listed at the end. There are a number of other co-authors who each contributed in different ways.
Example Paper 2
In this paper I was lead author and Saman was the second author, recognising that I did the majority of the work and that he, along with others, had a meaningful but smaller input. As before, two of my PhD supervisors are listed at the end.
Corresponding Author Meaning
If you’ve heard the term “corresponding author” you may be wondering where that fits in with the list we’ve just described.
Well, the meaning behind corresponding author is slightly different to the other roles shown above. The corresponding author is the person responsible for handling the manuscript submission, communicating with the journal, and responding to queries after publication.
A corresponding author is essentially the paper’s official point of contact.
Sometimes the corresponding author is the first author, but in other cases it may be the senior last author – especially if the lead author is a PhD student who might move on after graduation.
Example Author Order:
Below is an example of how all of these roles can come together in a single project.
| Name & Role | Authorship Order | Contribution |
| Sarah (PhD student) | First and corresponding author | Did the bulk of the work for the project, including writing the paper |
| Dr Jones (postdoc) | Second author | Supported Sarah day to day, helped with statistical analysis, and editing the manuscript |
| Dr Faulke (collaborator) | Third author | Provided access to a dataset and some facilities |
| Prof Collins (supervisor) | Final author | Secured funding and supervised the project |
The Relationship Between Author Order and Contributions
For STEM research papers the amount of effort spent on a paper will typically relate to the author order as follows.
Position of name:
- First – High time contribution, often low seniority
- Middle – Low-medium time contribution
- Last – Low-medium time contribution, high seniority
Among the middle co-authors, typically the more time put into the paper you’ll be closer to the front (especially if you’re relatively junior), or sometimes closer to the end if you’re relatively senior.
Of course effort isn’t just defined by how long someone spends on it. Where it becomes slightly ambiguous is when some people have contributed a lot of time (sometimes for labour-intensive but not very difficult work) and others have spent less time but contributed more to the underlying ideas. Usually the latter group of authors will appear nearer to the end.
It’s important to be aware that the amount of effort contributed after the first author can vary significantly.
For example, someone listed as the second author may have put in a decent chunk of their time (eg. weeks of effort) or have spent rather limited time (eg. one day). It’s generally all just relative to the efforts of other authors. In other words: they may still “deserve” being second author if they’ve contributed more than other authors closer to the centre of the author list. Therefore, I wouldn’t ever try and judge the absolute amount of effort someone contributed to a paper just by where they are in the author list: but the order does give you an indication of the relative effort among everyone besides the first author.
If there are lots of authors it is often the case that those near to the centre had quite minor contributions, and the contributions often ramp up as you get closer to the first and last author names.
Sometimes it will be the case that the first author did upwards of 90% of the work:
On other occasions the contribution will largely be flat across authors:
The one constant, in STEM at least, is for the person who led the work to be first author.
Guidelines on Who Qualifies as an Author
Since there is such a big incentive to boost the number of papers that each academic is associated with (i.e. be an author of), there is potential for authorship to be exploited. For instance, academics adding colleagues to papers even if they’ve not really contributed, and expecting the same in return. And then of course there is the dodgy business of paying for authorship.
In an effort to combat this, and make the bar for research paper author order more standardised, many journals now follow formal criteria. A widely used set comes from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). These usually say that someone must contribute meaningfully in several of the following areas:
- Designing the research
- Collecting or analysing data
- Writing or critically revising the manuscript
- Approving the final version
Of course the amount of input that someone had for any of these criteria isn’t typically quantified, so there still remains a lot of scope for people who probably don’t really deserve authorship to fly under the radar. However, the requirement to formally state who did what at the end of the paper does provide a way to reflect upon if certain co-authors really do deserve their place.
If someone only helped with proofreading, gave moral support, or ran a single analysis without understanding the broader study, they probably don’t qualify for authorship. Instead, they can be included in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section at the end of the paper.
And just to be clear: being mentioned in the acknowledgements doesn’t count as a publication and you wouldn’t put it on your CV. It’s a nice gesture on the part of the authors, but that’s it.
Where It Can Get Complicated
In theory, authorship is simple. In practice, it can be messy. Disputes often arise precisely because author order must compress messy realities into a single line of names within the research paper.
Who really deserves first author?
Let’s say someone did most of the lab experiments for a project, but then they left the lab and didn’t help write the paper. Another person comes along, assembles the manuscript, and submits it. Who should be the first author?
Some people are of the opinion that the person who writes the first draft of the research paper automatically becomes first author. Although it makes sense to reward the person who kickstarted the publishing process, I don’t love this approach since writing the paper is usually much less work than conducting the underlying research. Especially now that tools like ChatGPT make drafting faster than ever.
Writing is important, but if someone else put in significantly more hours doing the actual research, they deserve to be recognised for that and in my opinion should be joint first author at the very least – more on this in a moment.
Example of a real-life authorship debate:
I recently published some work from an undergraduate research project where the student had since graduated and gone into industry.
I was the one who suggested turning the work into a paper and took the lead on writing it, so probably could have justified being first author – not least because the undergraduate wouldn’t have known any better. But it didn’t feel right to take the first author spot as they had clearly put in far more effort overall. In the end I listed myself as the final author since I had supervised the project.
Side note: The research is completely unrelated to this post but if you’d like to check out the paper you can read it here. 🙂
High-level contributions vs time spent
There can also be tricky dynamics when someone contributes a small amount of time but provides high-level, valuable insights. For example, a senior academic might only attend a couple of meetings but offer advice that transforms the direction of the research. Should they be second author? Final author? Somewhere in the middle?
Sometimes these people aren’t even academics but instead, for example, senior medics who shared some pivotal domain expertise. My suggestion would be ask your supervisor/advisor first, then run it by the author in question to check they’re happy.
The politics of “gift authorship”
Sometimes supervisors push to include colleagues or collaborators who haven’t meaningfully contributed. They might want to strengthen relationships or boost someone’s CV. If you’re the one leading the project this can feel frustrating or unfair.
In these cases, it’s helpful to return to the core principle of academic authorship: meaningful contribution to the work. If someone’s name is on the paper, they should be able to point to their contribution and explain the motivation for the work.
Thankfully, I’ve personally not seen too much of this. I can only think of one, or perhaps two, papers of mine where it is questionable as to if someone had contributed enough. These were always instances where it was a senior medic who we had longstanding collaborations with: other authors were keen to add them to ensure that the collaboration would long continue.
Joint First Authorship: How Does It Work?
It is fairly common to see papers stating that two or more authors made equal contributions in leading the paper. Sometimes this is denoted by a symbol like an asterisk after their names and a statement such as:
“* These authors contributed equally to this paper”
Taking this approach enables two or more people to share the position of first author. Of course, one of them still has to still be listed ahead of the others, but even so this compromise can be a good way of resolving potential conflicts where two individuals feels like they’ve made a substantial contribution.
But how do you decide who is listed first? Usually there will still be a natural leader of the paper who it makes sense to put first, but otherwise you can discuss it, do it alphabetically, toss a coin, or any other method to come to a decision!
I’ve actually been in this situation a few times.
- Sometimes I was not the actual lead, so was listed second in the list but recognised with the equal contributions asterisk. For example here or here where we actually had three joint first authors.
- And another time, I led a piece of work but wanted to recognise the significant work a PhD student had done in helping. I knew that putting them as joint first author would be useful for their PhD, so suggested going with this approach for the paper.
Tip: Some hiring committees and grant reviewers still give more weight to the person listed first. If you’re listed second but equal, make sure you highlight this clearly on your CV (e.g. “Co-first author”) and be prepared to explain it in applications.
Talking About Authorship With Colleagues
Authorship decisions can feel awkward to bring up, especially when you’re early in your career. But it’s better to have the conversation sooner rather than later.
The first question to ask is who is taking the lead and will be first author? Later on you can think about the order for other authors and how that will be decided. Likewise, what the threshold is for someone to be an author.
Other tips:
- Talk about authorship at the start of a piece of work. It doesn’t need to be set in stone, but having a rough idea of roles and expectations helps ensure that everyone understands their required contribution.
- Be transparent and fair. If you’re leading a project, try to make authorship decisions based on contribution, not hierarchy or politics.
- Ask for advice. If you’re unsure, speak to your supervisor or a trusted academic. You can also check your university or department’s authorship guidelines, alongside those of the journal or conference you’re submitting to. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) also provides excellent resources.
- Stand up for yourself. I’ve heard horror stories where PhD students, who clearly led the work, get walked over by supervisors who rearrange the list of authors for what suits them best. This is most likely to happen when the student doesn’t know any better, so hopefully this post helps in that regard!
Taking Action If You’re Left Off a Research Paper
Unfortunately, it’s not unheard of for someone to contribute to a project and then be excluded from the author list. This is often an issue when you contributed in the early stages and people have forgotten about your input – and is a particular issue if you’ve since moved on to work elsewhere.
Ideally you’ll realise that you’ve been excluded before the paper is submitted, as once it’s accepted there isn’t usually much that can be done. Admittedly that is hard to do if you’re not in frequent discussion with the other authors.
Below are some actions you can take if you realise you’ve been excluded:
- Ask for clarification. Sometimes it’s an honest oversight, or the person in charge didn’t realise you expected authorship.
- State your case. If you believe you met the contribution criteria, explain what you did and why it merits inclusion.
- Escalate if needed. If the situation isn’t resolved and you feel unfairly treated, speak to your supervisor, graduate tutor, or departmental head.
Unless there is a personal grudge or hard limit on the number of authors (which some journals do have), I’d typically expect them to be reasonable about it: the important thing is that you raise it as early as possible.
Final Thoughts on Academic Authorship
Academic authorship can be more complicated than it first seems, but I hope this post has been a useful introduction. Hopefully you now feel comfortable understanding the meaning of terms like co-author and corresponding author.
During your PhD, you’ll often move between roles on different papers. Sometimes you’ll lead papers and other times you’ll hopefully have the opportunity to contribute as a co-author. Both are valuable experiences and evidence of contributions for your CV/resume.
What matters most is understanding how academic authorship works and being clear (and fair) about your own contribution. Do that and your publication record will reflect your work, and you’ll avoid many of the headaches that come from misunderstandings.
And if you do end up in an authorship dispute, remember: it’s the system that’s messy, not you. Even senior academics grapple with this; learning to navigate it is part of becoming a researcher.
If you found this post helpful, you might want to check out my series on writing and publishing your first academic paper.
Prefer to read all the information in one place? I’ve now turned it into a 75 page eBook so you can read it offline, highlight sections and add notes! The eBook is available for free to all subscribers:
Have a dilemma with the author order on your research paper? Drop me a message or share your experience. I’d love to hear from you!
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