Author: Judy Fan; Last updated: Jan 13 2022
This worksheet is intended to guide individual thinking about authorship order for specific papers, especially for frontline researchers working in larger teams. It is a working, living document and is not meant to be the final word on how to think about this complex issue. However, I do believe it can serve a useful purpose in helping to have healthy and systematic conversations about authorship order (under the unfortunate constraint that co-authorship is still, somewhat anachronistically, generally encoded using list-like data structures).
This worksheet has been superseded by the practice of logging contributions continually throughout the lifetime of a project in the contributions.md file housed within each project repo. Here is a link to the template.
- Originating the idea
- Carrying out the idea (i.e., consistent contributions sustained over time; counterfactually consequential to implementation)
- Interpreting & communicating the work (i.e., willingness to bring all of the threads together; write the paper / polish the figures / give the talk)
- Accountability for the work (i.e., sense of responsibility for overcoming obstacles; effective action taken with that sense of responsibility)
- Professional consequences (i.e., how much will what kind of authorship impact career advancement?)
How do you think the above principles apply to your involvement in the current project?
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Originating the idea: XXX
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Carrying out the idea: XXX
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Interpreting & communicating the work: XXX
-
Accountability for the work: XXX
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Professional consequences: XXX
Based on applying the above principles to the current situation, what do you think is an appropriate authorship list and order for this paper?
XXX