Academic Author How Names Order to [pdf]

The first line already made me laugh

>Author ordering is important [SHIT20]

On the ordering though, it is often a matter of discretion between the PIs and the first author(s). Most people generally don't care if they are second or third author unless it is some really huge paper on the scale of AlphaFold or attention-based transformer architecture. But the first spot is always highly desirable. Once that spot is hammered out, everything else is just formality.

Once the fixed spots are decided - probably the first and second or so - you could randomly sort the rest... Each time the document is printed/viewed. Not sure if can be done with pdfs though