Joint Primary Authorship

Summary: Some manuscripts indicate that the first 2 authors listed shared equally in the work. While describing specifically what each author’s contributions were would seem more precise and relevant, some promotion and tenure committees and funding agencies place great emphasis on order of authorship, so this distinction may be important for authors. This specification appears to be commonly permitted by journals.--MW

I recently received an inquiry about "joint primary authorship" from a prospective author. Does anyone have a policy about this for their journal? If so, would you be willing to share a copy of your policy with me?

Marcia Finlayson
Editor, Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy / Rédactrice en chef - Revue canadienne d'ergothérapie
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In such a case we add a footnote saying that both authors have contributed equally to the study.

Rob Siebers
Editor, New Zealand Journal of Medical Laboratory Science
Board Director, World Association of Medical Editors
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Another possibility is to list the authors in alphabetical order, and to mention this in a footnote/endnote.

Udo Schuklenk
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Whenever I see that "These two authors contributed equally to this work" footnote, it makes me wonder what the heck all the other authors in the by-line did—especially if the research being reported is simple and straightforward. I tend to assume they did very little aside from agreeing (or asking) to have their names added.

Perhaps editors should ask all authors to agree in writing to the inclusion of that sort of note, even though this would be more paperwork and would probably not lead to many guest authors dropping off the by-line.

Karen Shashok
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When I surveyed about 200 journal instructions, I found 4 allowed 'joint primary authorship'—they tended to be journals that report basic science rather than clinical medicine, but the practice is clearly not unknown.

The complete survey is available here http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/558094

I've often wondered how academic assessment boards (eg, research assessment and appointment committees) regard such papers with joint first authorship (as I assume the reason that two authors both want to be viewed as 'primary' has something to do with academic credit).

My personal preference is for journals to indicate individuals' contributions and let readers decide who should come 'first'...but I also wonder how such contributorship statements are handled by the (in my view misguided) authorities who measure academic productivity by the weight of a person's publication list.

With a surname like Wager, I'll leave you to work out what I think about alphabetic listing (!)

Liz Wager
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I agree entirely with you, Liz Wager, that the issue of supposed joint primary authors would be best resolved by stating what each does and letting readers decide. Unfortunately, she is right in assuming that academic assessment committees, etc. place undue emphasis on authorship order. It is actually a remarkably non-academic exercise and it can often be funny to listen to the discussions around what importance to attach to folks in relation to the order they appear. 'Misguided' is a terribly polite way to describe this foolishness.

IB Pless

Editor Emeritus, Injury Prevention
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Now wouldn't it be fun if all journals decided to publish authors' names in an entirely random order.

Tim Albert
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Actually, it would be no fun at all. Authors would rightly go on a rampage. Depending on discipline there are some reasonably (yes, usually unwritten) clear rules with re to what the authorship order signifies in terms of the role a given author has played in the construction of the final paper. In the absence of clear descriptions as to what each author has contributed (my preferred way of dealing with the issue at hand), an order indicating weight of contribution is well worth the effort.

Authors, as well as journals, do not operate in a professional vacuum. Funding agencies, eg, will want to know how significantly the researchers they fund contribute to particular research outputs. I've seen funding agencies require explicitly to list the order of authorship in order to ascertain applicants' relative contributions to particular outcomes. The same applies to tenure applications. And yes, having sat on selection committees in more than one academic institution I can confirm my Prof Pless' statement on how the authorship order is read by many people on such committees.

On one manuscript that I worked with a team of authors on, we had gone through serious discussion on the authorship order. It did matter to us, we deliberately chose not to have an alphabetical listing. In the end we were happy with the order, only to see the medical journal in question change it ('to save space'). I got to be honest, this just is not on. We had a lengthy exchange with the editorial team of the journal in question (and nothing much came of it).

Sorry about this somewhat lengthy rant on this. My bottom line on this is that we should ideally publish a description of each author's contribution to a particular output, but also that the team of authors is very much entitled to order the list of authors in way they see fit. I doubt that the issue is any longer that funding agencies, selection- and tenure committees just 'don't get it', but that perhaps journal editors should acknowledge that their authors do not produce their scientific outputs in a policy/funding vacuum.

Udo Schuklenk
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Instructions to authors, like journal Web sites, need periodic updating to remain current, and even when current, they never list all of the actual practices of a journal.

Anecdotally, I see co-primary authorships on papers in virtually every clinical journal I read and would expect a rate of at least 50% rather than 2%; instructions to authors provide only the most tangential evidence on the current frequency of this practice.

Bob Dellavalle
Dermatology Section Editor, UpToDate
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We studied perceptions of author contributions by byline name postion  (EMBO reports 8, 11, 988-991 (2007), http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v8/n11/full/7401095.html) and found that adding 2 more middle authors to a 3 person byline did not hurt the last (presumed senior) author's perceived contribution to the work.

A different paper elaborates an elegant solution to the problem of appropriately assigning credit for collaborative scholarship at the time of promotion evaluation: candidates for promotion identify up to 5 exemplary publications and describe the contributions of each author on electronic forms—their department then verifies the credibility of these descriptions and the department's assurance is evaluated by independent reviewers.

See page 88 paragraph 3 of

Feder ME, Madara JL. Evidence-Based Appointment and Promotion of Academic Faculty at the University of Chicago. Acad Med. 2008 Jan;83(1):85-95.

Bob Dellavalle
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The last author is not always "presumed senior" or the team/paper lead. In fact, this is commonly not the case these days. Take this paper as an example: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=15801981 (the most senior author/project P.I. is the second author out of seven named authors).

The best way to address this issue is to be extremely transparent about each individual author's specific contributions (published papers should have an 'Authors' contributions' section), even in case of joint primary authorship. Equal contributions are not necessarily the same.
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Liz has raised a very important issue on how authorities regard contributorship. My personal experience shows that this kind of innovative approach is not usually very welcomed by university boards, and they usually end up with "really, who has done this work! Show me the first author!".