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Comment by robxorb | Hacker News Reader

What's with the last author/first author thing in science papers?

I've read several times that the author listed last is usually the most significant contributor, and the first author the least significant, due to some kind of tradition around modesty plus favourably introducing new names. (Which then of course doesn't work, if everyone knows it's happening...)

Here, you've interpreted it as the reverse, and by that I mean in the sensible way - did you not know about the tradition, or are you wrong? And how can we know either way for sure?

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Conventions vary by field, but within a specific field they're usually pretty consistent. In natural sciences (except large physics papers) the convention is that the first author is the one doing most of the practical work. The last author is the PI (principal investigator) of the group who had a hand in designing the experiments and oversaw the research. Now, the latter can mean anything from barely doing any work on the paper to being deeply involved in the research.

If you're reading papers most of the time the last author is more meaningful to you because they're the senior researcher, you know their research interests and what kind of papers they produce. The first authors are PhD students and PostDocs, they change much more often.

Thank you, that makes my apparently half-formed prior understanding make a lot more sense. Seems the path forward is researching the greater context of the last authors work, and of course the common convention for each field.

Eg, as a sibling commented this convention may not be common in ML research, I wonder then if it may be something less common in emergent fields where researchers are generally be younger and less likely to follow older traditions.

>the author listed last is usually the most significant contributor

Where did you read that?

That's definitely not the case in machine learning.

I've read it in several places over the years, and just had a search now to find a reference to cite. Here's a PubMed paper on the subject:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010799/

(And note how points 1 through 4 all quite conflict with each other!)

If it helps think of the first author as the lead engineer or the CEO, and the last author as the board or the VC. In some areas of science (or some teams) the last author is closer to a CEO, in others closer to a VC (they almost always have the powers of the board). This picture does not contradict the guideline in the reference you shared. Typically, most of the work and writing of the paper is done by the first author, though sometimes, for example when a student gives up, only most of the writing of the paper. The main ideas may be from the first author or from the last author, and rarely in between, but the sorting typically goes by amount of labor/contributions on the task. In some narrow subfields, including most math, sorting is alphabetical or random.

That does help, thanks! Very intuitive analogy. Maybe this kind of organisational structure is a kind of natural archetype people gravitate towards when coming together to break new ground.

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