How to Avoid Authorship Order Disputes in Academic Publishing?
Disputes over the authorship order in soon-to-be-published papers are probably the most pointless fights that can ruin personal relationships and even academic careers. Usually, there is little to win and a lot to lose by fighting over the authorship order.
Why do fights emerge?
The root cause for authorship disputes is that coauthoring is teamwork and there is no objective way to measure an individual contribution to a co-authored paper.
Yet, we could still try to agree on a simple, unambiguous rule on how to order author names in a paper. For instance, maybe we could simply put the names into alphabetical order and agree that the order is not intended to signal each authors’ relative contribution to the paper. As much as I would personally love this solution, alphabetical order is not fair. Weber (2018) reviews empirical literature on the topic and finds that there is substantial evidence that alphabetical order gives advantage to those whose name is closer to the beginning of the alphabets—i.e., if you coauthor with me and a third person, chances are that I will be ‘Aaltonen’ and you two will be ‘et al.’ whenever somebody cites the paper.
How about random order then? Similarly to alphabetical order, this would mean that the order of authors’ names does not carry information about the authors’ relative contribution to a paper. Yet, if there is no signal about who did the heavy lifting, this could make freeriding more attractive and reduce incentives for anyone to carry the role of a lead author. A further problem with any attempt to avoid signaling relative contributions is that single-authored papers will always signal the unique contribution of their authors.
In short, there may not be a simple ‘algorithm’ how to order authors’ names in an academic paper fairly.
How to avoid fights, then?
To begin with, it is good to remember that the authorship order probably matters much more to the authors themselves than others. The others probably just see your name on the paper. So, before you let the ordering of team members’ names descend into a clash of egos, ask yourself:
Is it really worth it?
If you feel that someone is treating you unfairly with respect to the authorship order, you are probably not going to work with them anyway in the future. Even if you win the fight, you may gain an enemy which can harm your academic prospects much more than whatever tiny advantage you may get from the ‘right’ authorship order in the paper.
In short, get the paper out and move on…
It may also help to try to see the situation from the perspective of the other party — especially when the dispute is between clearly more senior and more junior persons. For a junior scholar (or a PhD student), it may seem that the senior person is claiming the work that is literally the junior’s entire academic output — without putting in that much effort.
While the above may be true, it is also often true that the senior person’s input is critical in getting the paper published. Personally, I have been saved from months of wasted efforts and undoubtedly several rejections by senior scholars quickly pointing out issues in my work and suggesting how I might address them. The value of different contributions to a paper are not measured in hours worked.
A solution
The way I try to avoid authorship disputes is to settle with the team either: i) the authorship order, or ii) the rule by which the order will be settled, before starting to coauthor a paper. In the former option, team members can then adjust their contributions according to their ‘rank’ in the project, while the latter provides a common ground for settling the matter later on. However, it is good to record the rule in writing, for instance, in an email so that people cannot have their own recollections of the rule years later when the paper is finally coming out and the authorship order needs to be settled for good. Also, an equal contribution statement is sometimes a good way to indicate that all team members provided indispensable input to the paper throughout the process.
My solution does not guarantee that a group of scholars can agree on the authorship order, but it can help to unearth disagreements in advance, that is, before you have put a lot of effort into the project. You can then decide if you want to work on the project at all or put your precious time into something else.
In summary…
I have never seen anything good come out from a fight over an authorship order. The order should be settled fairly, yet there is no simple ‘algorithm’ and different team members can have different but legitimate views of what is fair with respect to a particular paper. My recommendation is to expose such differences in advance so that they can be (hopefully) resolved by reasoned argument.
References
Weber, M. (2018). The effects of listing authors in alphabetical order: A review of the empirical evidence. Research Evaluation 27(3), 238–245. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvy008
