This survey revealed that most ecologists view the last author as the “senior” author on a paper (that is, the person who runs the research group in which most of the work was carried out), and most ecologists view the corresponding author as the person taking full responsibility for a paper. ![]() I also carried out an online survey to better understand views on last and corresponding authorship. Using an analysis of papers published in American Naturalist, Ecology, Evolution, and Oikos, I found that: 1) the number of authors on papers is increasing over time 2) the proportion of first authors as corresponding author has increased over time, as has the proportion of last authors as corresponding author 3) 84% of papers published in 2016 had the first author as corresponding author and 4) geographic regions differed in the likelihood of having the first (or last) author as corresponding author. However, while there is general agreement within ecology that the first author is the person who contributed the most to a particular project, there is less agreement regarding whether being last author is a position of significance and regarding what is indicated by someone being the corresponding author on a manuscript. What did I find? This is the abstract of the paper:Īuthorship is intended to convey information regarding credit and responsibility for manuscripts. But I kept hearing comments from colleagues at various institutions about author order or corresponding authorship coming up as an issue, especially related to tenure & promotion discussions, so it seemed important to get this information out there in a format where it could easily be shared. I almost gave up on this paper multiple times, because I wasn’t sure it was worth the time. Notably, though, in the past year I did hear colleagues bring it up a couple of times. At Georgia Tech, I was also told that I needed to be corresponding author on papers out of my lab when I first got to Michigan, I never heard anyone mention corresponding authorship as something that mattered (and that included when I directly asked a couple of people about it). 2008 Freshwater Biology), so the advice I got at Georgia Tech surprised me at first. ![]() But I have a paper from work I did as a grad student where I am the last author (with my advisor as a middle author) because I did the least work on the project ( Cáceres et al. ![]() When I was at Georgia Tech, I was told that I should be last author on all papers coming out of my lab as a sign of having driven the work. Before that, I had a tweet storm as I thought through issues, and that, in turn, was motivated by needing to decide on author order for a manuscript. I suppose it’s actually not quite accurate to say the paper arose out of a poll. Normally I don’t plug my papers on the blog, but this one is different: this paper arose out of a poll and a series of blog posts on the site, so it seems appropriate to wrap things up with a quick post today. My paper on last and corresponding authorship appeared in the journal Ecology & Evolution today.
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