Last and corresponding authorship practices in ecology

Abstract

Authorship is intended to convey information regarding credit and responsibility for manuscripts. However, while there is general agreement within ecology that the first author is the person who contributed the most to a particular project, there is less agreement regarding whether being last author is a position of significance and regarding what is indicated by someone being the corresponding author on a manuscript. Using an analysis of papers published in American Naturalist, Ecology, Evolution, and Oikos, I found that: (1) the number of authors on papers is increasing over time; (2) the proportion of first authors as corresponding author has increased over time, as has the proportion of last authors as corresponding author; (3) 84% of papers published in 2016 had the first author as corresponding author; and (4) geographic regions differed in the likelihood of having the first (or last) author as corresponding author. I also carried out an online survey to better understand views on last and corresponding authorship. This survey revealed that most ecologists view the last author as the "senior" author on a paper (i.e., the person who runs the research group in which most of the work was carried out), and most ecologists view the corresponding author as the person taking full responsibility for a paper. However, there was substantial variation in views on authorship, especially corresponding authorship. Given these results, I suggest that discussions of authorship have as their starting point that the first author will be corresponding author and the senior author will be last author. I also suggest ways of deciding author order in cases where two senior authors contributed equally.

Keywords: authorship; contribution statements; corresponding author; last author.

Figure 1

Stacks containing bound volumes of journals (Shapiro Library, University of Michigan)

Figure 2

Number of authors on papers in American Naturalist, Ecology, Evolution, and Oikos over time. See Section 2 for more information on which journal issues were analyzed. (a) Data for Ecology for 1956–2016. (b) Data for American Naturalist, Ecology, Evolution, and Oikos for 2001–2016

Figure 3

Corresponding author position for articles in American Naturalist, Ecology, Evolution, and Oikos. “ND” means that a corresponding author was not designated

Figure 4

Influence of geographic region and number of authors on corresponding authorship. (a) Percentage of corresponding authors from different geographic regions who are first author (gray bars) or last author (blue bars). The statistical analysis of this dataset only included regions with at least 50 publications. (b) Relationship between the number of authors on a paper and whether the corresponding author is the first author (gray bars) or last author (blue bars). Numbers over the bars indicate the number of papers in that category. The gray and blue bars do not always sum to 100% because, rarely, the corresponding author was a middle author or a combination of authors (see Fig. 3 for general patterns)

Figure 5

Views of poll respondents on (a) whether the last author of a paper is the senior author and (b) whether they would pay attention to a statement on the CV indicating that the last author position was one of emphasis

Figure 6

Variation in views on last authorship by career stage, geographic location, research area, and department type. The bars shaded in greens are positive responses to the question “For ecology papers, do you consider the last author to be the senior author,” whereas gold responses are negative responses (as described in the figure legend). The percentage on the right gives the total percentage of positive responses, while the percentage on the left gives the total percentage of negative responses for a group. The number on the right‐hand side shows the number of respondents in a given category (e.g., 29 respondents indicated that they live in South America)

Figure 7

Views of poll respondents on current (light blue) and best (gray) practices for corresponding authorship

Figure 8

Influence of career stage, research area, department type, and geographic location on views on current corresponding authorship practices