I'm not sure whose name goes on the paper, or in what order
Raise authorship early and in writing, and know what to do if it starts to feel unfair.
In short
Start here, today. For the paper in question, list everyone involved and what each person actually did: the idea, the design, data collection, analysis, writing, revising, funding, supervision. Use the CRediT roles as a checklist so nothing gets missed. This takes about 20 minutes.
After that, work through these steps. Choose one to jump to it.
Step by step
Tick each step as you finish it. Open a step for the how.
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Find out the rules that apply
Ask a couple of people in your field how authorship usually works, and look at recent papers from your group. Then find your university's authorship or research integrity policy and the target journal's authorship criteria. Medical and health journals often follow the ICMJE criteria, which are stricter than many people assume.
Raise it early and in writing
The best time to discuss authorship is when the paper is being planned. Suggest a short conversation about who will be an author, in what order, and who will do which parts. Afterwards, send a brief summary email so everyone has the same record.
Use contributor roles to make it concrete
The CRediT taxonomy sets out 14 contributor roles, such as methodology, formal analysis, investigation and writing the original draft, and many journals now ask for a contribution statement based on it. Mapping who did what moves the conversation from feelings to facts, which makes it easier for everyone.
Revisit it when the work changes
Contributions shift over the life of a paper. Someone leaves the project, a new analysis is needed, or one person ends up doing far more than planned. Agree at the start that authorship will be checked again before submission and after major revisions.
If you feel left off or added unfairly
Write down the facts first: what you contributed, when, and the evidence, such as emails, drafts, code or lab notebooks. Ask for a conversation and frame it around contributions and the field's norms rather than fairness in general. If you're being added to a paper you didn't contribute to, you're allowed to decline; your name on a paper means you can stand behind it.
Bring in a neutral person if needed
If the conversation goes nowhere, or the disagreement is with your supervisor, talk to another committee member, your graduate coordinator, or your university's research integrity office or ombudsperson. COPE publishes guidance and flowcharts on authorship problems that journal editors use, and reading them shows you what options exist. If the paper has already been submitted, the journal editor can be involved, though that is usually a later step.
Words you can use
Is this you? Signs to look for
- You're writing a paper with others and nobody has said who the authors will be.
- You did most of the analysis and drafting, and a recent version lists you further down than you expected.
- Someone who hasn't contributed is being added, and you don't feel able to question it.
- Your co-authors come from different fields and seem to assume different rules about name order.
Why this happens
Authorship causes a lot of quiet tension in research teams, and most of it comes from assumptions nobody said out loud. People hold different ideas about who counts as an author and what the order of names means, and those ideas often come from the field they trained in.
Norms really do vary. In many lab sciences, the first author did most of the work and the last author is the senior researcher who led the project. In economics and mathematics, names are often listed alphabetically. In much of the humanities, single-authored work is the norm and a supervisor is rarely a co-author. Nobody is wrong for carrying the norms they learned, but those norms need to meet before the paper is written, not after.
There is also a power imbalance. Raising authorship with a supervisor or senior collaborator can feel risky, which is exactly why it is easier to raise early, as an ordinary planning question, than later as a complaint.
Worth a look (5)
- CRediT contributor rolesThe 14 contributor roles many journals use for contribution statements.
- COPE, Committee on Publication EthicsGuidance and flowcharts on authorship disputes and other publication ethics questions.
- Think. Check. Submit.Simple checklists to help you judge whether a journal or book publisher can be trusted before you submit. They're available in many languages.
- Open policy finderCheck a journal's open access policies, including which version of your paper you can share and where. It replaced Sherpa Romeo, so older guides may still use that name.
- DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)A curated list of peer-reviewed open access journals in every field. Use it to find journals to read and to check that a journal you're considering is legitimate.
When to bring someone in
If you can't raise authorship with your supervisor directly, start with another committee member or your graduate coordinator. For disputes that conversation doesn't settle, your university's research integrity office or ombudsperson can advise confidentially, and your graduate student union or association may be able to support you.
Find the right person, or talk to Ify