How is author order decided on a paper?

Authorship disputes are among the most common serious conflicts in research, and almost all of them share a cause: the order was never discussed until the paper was nearly finished, by which point everyone has a different memory of what they contributed.

The fix is a conversation at the start and a written record of it. Who is on the paper, in what order, and what has to change for that to change. Five minutes and an email, revisited if the project shifts substantially. It feels unnecessary between people who get along, which is exactly when it is easiest to do.

Make the agreement concrete rather than agreeing in principle. Frassl and colleagues recommend deciding at the start which tasks qualify for authorship, and they list generating ideas, obtaining funding, collecting or providing data, analyzing results, preparing figures and tables, and writing sections. You then track who does each task and place the strongest contributor first, or group authors by activity level, with an author-order statement and a contribution statement in the paper (Frassl et al., 2018, p. 3). They also note that the person leading the writing is usually the first author but does not have to be, and that if someone's commitments change or the paper's focus shifts, another person can take over the lead and the first position while the earlier leader's work is still credited (Frassl et al., 2018, p. 2).

Field conventions differ enough to cause real confusion in interdisciplinary work. Most life and social sciences use a contribution ordering, with the first position for the person who did most of the work and the last for the senior author who secured funding and supervised. Mathematics, theoretical computer science, and much of economics use alphabetical order, where position carries no information at all.

The largest review of the evidence, covering 118 studies, found that most disciplines order authors by the type and amount of work rather than by seniority or formal position, and that research conception or design and manuscript writing are the contributions most widely treated as qualifying (Marušić et al., 2011, pp. 13-14). The alphabetical minority is not stable. Between 1974 and 1999 alphabetical ordering rose by 9.9% in economics and 18.6% in the social sciences, while it fell by 82% in medical journals and 39.1% in natural science journals. In economics the position is also not neutral in practice, since letters closer to the front of the alphabet were associated with higher tenure probability and professional recognition, and an additional article with alphabetical authorship carried an estimated 0.41% salary return (Marušić et al., 2011, p. 8).

Contribution statements have reduced the ambiguity substantially. Many journals now require a structured statement of who did what, which makes the ordering less consequential and gives you something concrete to point at on a CV or in an interview.

On very large papers the order stops carrying reliable information at all. Kohrs and colleagues, writing about non-empirical papers with 30 authors or more, say contributions there are difficult to quantify, partly because a reviewer who joins later makes fewer comments once the major problems have already been found, and partly because roles keep changing. The arrangements they describe put the lead writers in the first and last positions and list middle authors alphabetically or randomly, or name the lead writers and move the remaining contributors into a consortium (Kohrs et al., 2025, p. 6). If you are one of 40 names, ask which of those schemes is in use before you assume your position means anything.

What counts as enough contribution for authorship?

Substantial involvement in the work plus responsibility for it. Standard criteria require a contribution to design, data, or analysis, involvement in drafting or revising, approval of the final version, and accountability for the whole. Providing funding or a dataset alone does not qualify.

Two practices are treated as misconduct. Gift authorship adds someone who did not contribute, usually a senior figure. Ghost authorship omits someone who did, which is the more damaging of the two and is the one doctoral students are most likely to suffer from.

People who helped without meeting the criteria belong in the acknowledgments, named, with what they did. That is a real form of credit and it is often forgotten.

What do I do about an authorship dispute?

Go back to the written agreement if there is one, then to the contribution criteria, then to a third party: another supervisor, a department head, or your research integrity office. Have the conversation before submission, since resolving it afterwards is much harder and can delay publication.

Journals will generally not adjudicate authorship. If a dispute reaches an editor after submission, the usual response is to pause the paper until the authors resolve it themselves, which helps nobody.

You are not an unusual case if this happens to you. Across 14 survey studies pooled in the same review, 29% of respondents said they had experienced authorship problems, and the review names supervisor and student relationships as the place where the power imbalance around author order is sharpest (Marušić et al., 2011, p. 14).

For a doctoral student in dispute with a supervisor, the power imbalance is real and worth naming to yourself. Most institutions have someone independent, in a graduate school or a research integrity office, whose job is exactly this. Using that route is normal rather than escalatory.