Life sciences field.
I’m working on my first first-author paper and we’re on the final stages of draft editing before submission. I’m starting to wonder about changing authorship order. When I presented this research at a conference and printed my poster, the statistician involved had a limited contribution to the work, as I had done some more simplistic testing like ANOVA and regressions and they just helped me with one additional test and the wording. Now that has changed.
The contributions as they sit with the previous order are as follows:
Me – designed the research, data collection (both fieldwork and derived from an online source), simpler data analysis, writing 90% of the manuscript, etc… This was my undergrad thesis.
2nd author – Assisted with design, data collection (just fieldwork that’s made it into the manuscript. I had to re-do the collection of the online dataset for some methods issues, which has overwritten their work), **has ghosted us for manuscript edits.**
3rd author – lots of more complex data analysis and all figure creation, writing the results section to accompany the figures, edits every draft
4th author (PI) – conceived the question, usual PI stuff, lots of edits, etc. You know the drill.
So my PI said we can figure out the order among ourselves. Both 2nd and 3rd author say they “don’t care” (I think because we’re all a bunch of people pleasers and we’re all friends!). They are both students for whom this paper could be really helpful to their career. I think as it stands with all their extra work, the 3rd author deserves to be bumped up. It’s a different piece of research than it was when I took it to the conference, and they’ve put in more significant work at this point.
Just looking for a second opinion on my decision here, I guess!
Comments
If they don’t care it’s up to you. So do whatever seems right to you. That was easy!
If it’s not first or last author, the difference is negligible in my field. If I said that I didn’t care about being 2nd vs. 3rd, that would be nothing more than honest truth.
They don’t care, so do whatever you think is best.
I’d probably swap 2nd & 3rd too. But also it’s really just first, middle, last. The order on the middle ones doesn’t make a big difference.