Authorship

In general, lab members who contribute significantly to a project are entitled to be listed as authors on publications stemming from that work. Contributions meriting authorship may include: designing a study, building a study (e.g., stimulus preparation, programming, pilot testing), collecting data for a study, analyzing data that is ultimately used in the publication, helping with data interpretation, writing up parts or all of the manuscript, and/or editing the manuscript, and/or preparing the manuscript for journal submission (e.g., preparing figures for final submission). "Significant" is somewhat subjective, but in general entails contributions over extended periods of time (e.g., an academic term).

Contrary to what you may have read or heard—or even experienced in other labs—in our lab authorship does not require making contributions to the study design or interpretation of results. As noted above, significant contributions to data collection can merit authorship, even if the trainee was not involved in designing the study or later analyzing the data. All the contributions listed above, in my mind, are important and meritorious contributions that should be recognized. Moreover, this is "win-win" for all involved: trainees benefit from having their names on publications of work they were involved in, and I benefit from having trainees as co-authors on publications (which is a heavily-weighted criterion for many grants). Trainees should also note that, when you include junior trainees as co-authors on a paper, you (if supervisor of these junior trainees) can often use this as evidence of mentorship activities, which can be a strength in future applications.

It is worth noting conditions under which authorship may not be granted. These include contributions, as noted above, that were performed poorly—e.g., data that is of poor quality and/or unusable, failure to follow lab protocols, analyses done poorly or not according to instructions. People who are deemed to have behaved unethically may also be excluded from authorship.

Order of Authors on Publications

The general norms in (most) areas our lab publishes in are that the principal investigator (PI)—the person funding and overseeing the study—is the last author, and the first author is the person who was primarily responsible for the study occurring (design, data collection, and analysis), and who wrote the study up for publication to standards suitable for journal submission. Other co-authors are then normally listed in order of the amount and significance of their contributions. In some cases, a footnote to the author list may indicate that the first two authors on a paper made equal contributions. Senior members of the research team (e.g., collaborating professors) are often listed at the end of the authors list, with the PI as the last author, and other professors' names preceding the PI's name.

However, authorship can get complicated in cases where multiple trainees worked on a project, or where a trainee left the lab with a project completed to standards suitable for their academic level, but not suitable for journal submission. If study design, data collection, and data analysis are completed by one person, but they do not leave the lab with a writeup that is ready (or nearly ready) for journal submission, and another trainee writes up the project, then the trainee who writes up the study for journal submission and shepherds it through the review and revision process will likely end up being first author. In this case footnotes or Author Contribution sections can make it clear what contributions other authors made.