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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much what I came here to post.

Anyone who's even been adjacent to scientific academia knows that the lead author is typically the advisor to the grad student or post doc that actually did the research and wrote the paper.

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In my experience the lead author is always the post doc or grad student who actually did the research and wrote the paper, while the advisor is the last author and they developed the grant to fund both the grad student and post doc. If you collaborate with another lab, their post docs go towards the front behind your name and the advisor goes somewhere at the end. If two people equally wrote a paper they might be 1 and 2 and get an asterisk indicating they are both co first authors. If anyone was involved at all in the work e.g data collection or anyone involved with running an assay they go somewhere in the middle. Perhaps it’s different in other fields

This sounds like a terminological issue. Without further context, I would assume that "lead author" means the last/senior author, not the first/junior author. But I guess that's a life sciences tradition.

"Who actually did the research" is not always an accurate description of the first author. There are plenty of papers, where the last author had already contributed enough to justify authorship before the first author was even hired. You often need to develop the idea and get preliminary results to convince someone to fund the project, before you get the money to hire the first author to work on the idea.

Yep, this is what I learned in Grad school as well. First author is the primary person doing the work typically, then their advisor will be the last, and then you work towards the middle. So names in the middle of a paper typically contribute less than either edge!

When I was a grad student the only time my PI was listed first on a paper was when he actually did most of the work and I just helped with maths. Otherwise the PI was last and the grad students and post docs doing the research up front. People doing data collection or other ancillary work were mentioned in the acknowledgement section at the end.

When the author count is much higher, like in the thousands in high energy physics, there are different norms like listing the authors alphabetically if the paper summarizes many significant achievements.

In the in-between author order is negotiated.

This varies greatly by discipline and tradition - sometimes even within the same research groups. For example, some people put the senior person / advisor first, some put this person last, some go by alphabet.

In my experience, there is even more variation in the amount of work expected to be put into a publication by said senior person. To put it mildly. ^^

...and imagine how well it would go over for a grad student to say "actually Dr Advisor, you don't meet the criteria for authorship"

I've seen someone who desperately wanted their nobel laureate PI on their paper but the professor did not put his name on the paper because it was all their idea (even though it was his grant, he reviewed and ok'd the paper, paper was relevant to his lab, and he really spoke effusively at their thesis defense)

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