Motivation for a Professor to be the first author of a paper when collaborating with their own student

Question

I am a graduate student focused on a subdivision of theoretical physics. When I am browsing papers, I find out an interesting case about the author's name ranking:

Let's assume there is a professor A (tenured) and B is a Ph.D. student supervised solely by A (which means there is no co-advising). There are plenty of published papers where the author list is made by only A and B. In my previous understanding, the first author is often given to the student(s) and the professor can be safely placed on the last of the author list to claim the achievement, as long as the professor acts as the corresponding author. However, the reality is that A is placed in front of B among most of their published papers (so the author list is: [A, B]), except for one paper where there are some other collaborators (i.e. [B, X1, X2..., A]).

I can't help figuring out the motivation for a professor to claim the first authorship over his own student. One of the reasons I could imagine is that student B cannot come up with meaningful research ideas or cannot carry out research independently. However, B has published X papers with A already (X>3) in some high-impact journals, and B's personal publication record is also promising (has more than 10 publications).

Can anyone share their thoughts about this situation? I have never seen such an interesting and unique case for the authorship arrangement.

Answer 1

It's because for those papers, it's the profesor who deserves the first authorship.

In my field (not physics), the first author is usually the person who did most of the work and wrote the paper, so if a professor is first, it might mean they did work that would warrant the first authorship to anybody. Expecting professors to not be first authors would mean they are destined to only consult and supervise projects. Just because someone is a professor, that doesn't mean they need to give every idea they have to a student to fully develop.

Careerwise and CWwise, first authorship is better than middle authorship, but in my field, the last authorship is more prestigious than the first, so it would make more sense to move the student to be the first author, however, this might not be the case in theoretical physics and it's probably not the case for papers with only 2 authors. In any case, putting someone as the first author, even when they didn't do the first author's work, would be considered unethical.

Answer 2

Customs differ between disciplines. In pure Mathematics, author lists tend to be strictly alphabetically ordered. In Computer Science, your ordering is used. If the professor's name comes after the student's in alphabetical order, it might be that the professor feels that the professor's contributions outweigh the student's so that it would be deceitful to put the student's name first. Given the closeness of Theoretical Physics to Pure Mathematics, I assume that alphabetical ordering is used.

Answer 3

Publication history is irrelevant here. What matters is the contribution to the current manuscript. It may be that the person who did the heavy lifting is the senior person, and they feel no student did enough to warrant being first author.

This happens when one persons had major input in identifying the calculation to be done, actually starting the calculation, interpreting the result of the calculation, and/or writing the manuscript (or combinations of the above) whereas others had only minor input.

The message here is that, if you want to be first author, you have to earn it.