How do you determine the order of authorship?
As mentioned above, the most common way authors are listed is by relative contribution. The author who most substantially worked on the draft article and the underlying research becomes the first author. The others are ranked in descending order of contribution.
What is the difference between first author and corresponding author?
This is a common doubt, especially at the beginning of a researcher’s career, but easy to explain: fundamentally, a corresponding author takes the lead in the manuscript submission for publication process, whereas the first author is actually the one who did the research and wrote the manuscript.
What is the difference between an author and a writer?
According to the dictionary, a writer is ‘one who expresses ideas in writing’ or ‘one engaged in literary work. An author is ‘a person who writes a novel, poem, essay etc, the composer of a literary work.
Can the first author be the corresponding author?
There is nothing wrong in the first author or lead author being the corresponding author as well. In fact, for single author papers, that is always the case. The purpose of having a corresponding author is to facilitate ease of communication with the journal.
Who gets first author?
And because of the way work gets cited (e.g., “First Author, et al., 2010”) the first author’s name is the most visible to readers. Sometimes more than one author can be “first,” indicated by an asterisk or other typographical symbol and an explanatory note. But the person listed first is always the most visible.