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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

The nice thing about credits compared to authors is that credits generally have a title/role/position associated with the name. (A grip does a very different job than a costume designer, but with a paper they're all just authors which has a different meaning than say "research director")

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For scientific papers, depending on the field, order of listing actually is some indication of role. I think the convention in bio research is 1st author is the primary creator of the experiment and paper while last author is the lab PI.

Per this science.org column, that seems typical across a number of scientific disciplines. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-navigate-authors....

It’s the same in my field (CS: security and privacy). The most senior people tend to be in the end of the list. The first author is typically a student/postdoc who did the technical leadership on the work, and they get the benefit of getting their name out there in the shorthand citation (“AuthorName, S&P ‘23”).

yes this has been, and continues to be the case from my perspective, for at least the last 50 years.

It's certainly not perfect (still a bit coarse, doesn't state what % of the work is done, doesn't state which parts of the paper the author worked on), but CRediT statements are gaining increasing traction in the published literature: https://credit.niso.org/

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