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So I still don't understand why these professors don't have their name second after the student author. It's still prestigious to guiding some of the best minds but also very honest, maybe even have a special symbol to indicate it as such in parenthesis.

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I am sure it can be different everywhere, but at least my advisor in grad school was great about making sure the students were ahead of him in the list. The student(s) who were primarily responsible were first and then he would be on it after.

Out of curiosity I checked and he has 161 publications on Google Scholar. Of the publications with multiple authors he is first author on only 7 of them. And then 7 are single author.

This is the standard protocol

In the fields of physics I'm familiar with the group leader is usually listed last on papers. They get credit wherever they are in the author list, while being first or second author carries more cachet for students and postdocs who are trying to establish their careers.

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