Educated Guesswork: How to read the author list on a paper

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March 18, 2005

How to read the author list on a paper

Eu-Jin Goh pointed me to this cartoon showing how to read the author list on a paper:

When I was in Chemistry, the rule I remember being told was:

First author is the person who did most of the work.
Last author is the principal investigator in who's lab the work was done.
The other authors are in descending order of contribution.

This varies a bit across fields. In crypto, for instance, it's generally alphabetical, which is good news if your name is Adelman, bad news if your name is Wang.

Posted by ekr at March 18, 2005 10:42 PM | Filed under:

Comments

Well, in crypto it means if your name is Wang, you can bet that you'll be looking for colleagues name Xiang and Zhiau. I wonder if the market for co authros is actually affected?

Posted by: Kevin Dick at March 19, 2005 8:48 AM

The papers I've done have almost always had the person whose work was the center of the paper as the first author. Though if you're going to do the alphabetical order thing on author names, it pays to coauthor a lot of papers with Doug Whiting and David Wagner.

--John Kelsey

Posted by: John Kelsey at March 23, 2005 8:36 AM