Authorship Conventions in the Laboratory Sciences: Quotations from "Cantor's Dilemma" by Carl Djerassi

Conversation between Professor Jean Ardley, her graduate student, Celestine, and Stafford, another graduate student who has Professor Cantor as his supervisor.

"[I]n the laboratory sciences, there's both a teacher-apprentice relationship and collegiality which usually justify the professor's being one of the authors. In fact, most people in the field-- including Celestine-- would consider me senior author." *

"It's not necessarily the first name in the list of authors, although some senior researchers feel very strongly that their names must always appear first. Others always use an alphabetical order--"

"Especially if their names start with one of the early letters of the alphabet! Like A or C!" Stafford's outburst suprised Celestine.

"Jerry, you aren't fair! Jean always puts her name last when she publishes with her students."

"Well, it's not true in our lab," he mumbled, "it's always alphabetical."  This was the only serious bone of contention in Cantor's group. Lab gossip had it that not Allens or Browns had ever worked with Cantor. There had been an exchange fellow from Prague, named Czerny, but that was the closest alphabetical proximity to "Cantor" that anyone remembered until Doug Cattfield had arrived last year.

 

• *Notice that here "senior author" means the primary author. Sometimes it is used to mean the most senior person who is an author on the paper (and who is often presumed to have the "big picture" about the place of this work in the larger scheme of research, or may even be the supervisor of some of the other authors.