Should I leave the first authorship of our paper to the student who did the project whereas I solved it?

Question

I (as a Ph.D. student) supervised a masters project.

In particular, I defined the problem statement and prepared a sketch of the solution, that is, the steps which had to be done to achieve the solution. The masters student basically followed those steps which were mostly programming implementations. I composed the paper. Now, the paper is ready to be published, and I'm in a dilemma in selecting the first author of the paper.

On the one hand, I feel I am the right one because I solved the critical part of the problem, and the student just implemented what I had already planned. On the other hand, he may want to apply for a graduate position later, and I understand that he would morally expect to be the first author as this paper is his only serious research output. My supervisor left the issue to me by stating that my opinion would be his.

We unfortunately didn't set any specific set of expectations beforehand, particularly regarding papers and authorships.

According to a neutral mind, who most deserves to be the first author?

PS. The field is electrical engineering.

Answer 1

It would, perhaps, be generous of you to do so, but not necessarily wrong. In math and CS, listing authors alphabetically would probably be appropriate with little or no attention to "first" authorship.

But an academic being seen as generous is not a bad thing. Too many questions here are just the opposite, demanding first authorship, sometimes properly and sometimes not. But such generosity is more typical in a professor with an established reputation than in a current grad student.

But a serious consideration would entail looking at whether the student made a significant intellectual contribution to the work. If not, then first authorship is probably overly generous and might set a bad precedent in the mind of that student.

I'm with your professor on this. Your call. But the advice in comments (BrianH) on setting expectations at the start is good - even essential.

Answer 2

I work in an engineering field, and my PhD students often do what you described. In my opinion, you should be the first author because

• you have set the problem;
• you have set the outline of the solution and supervised the student;
• you have composed the paper.

To grant the first authorship to a master student, she usually needs to

• at least contribute to the development some novel ideas;
• take most of the writing burden.

Answer 3

Since the work would not exist at all without the contributions of either one of you, in my view, it would be entirely appropriate to share first authorship. This is done by placing an asterisk by each of your names pointing to a footnote indicating "these authors contributed equally".

This reflects positively on both of you and does not detract from the contributions of either one. You can both list the paper in the "first author publications" section of your CV, and it costs nothing to do. Also, in my experience, one cannot usually implement an entire solution of any complexity without contributing intellectually to it in a significant way.

In my field first authorship normally goes to whoever actually did the work. However, my opinion has always been that credit is a thing best distributed as widely as possible, within reason of course.

Answer 4

This answer assumes that we are not talking about the Master's Thesis of the student here, just some project during your and his time at uni, which stems from the line of inquiry *you* are following in your PhD studies.

According to your question and subsequent comments, you clearly did the intellectual and editorial work, presumably you wrote all natural language sentences; the student clearly provided the (relatively) menial task of writing the code. Without the student's contribution, your paper might still have valid meaning as a purely theoretical piece (or you could have done the programming yourself if you had the time). Without your contribution, there would be nothing at all. You were the "owner" here.I also don't get the vibe that you had regular meetings with the student on an equal footing, as a "sparring partner", but it was a clear top-down relationship.

Of course the student wants to have primary authorship, but that does not change the fact that he has not been the primary author. If I understood you right he authored nothing of the paper, only the source code - which probably is not the thing that's printed in publication and consumed by avid readers.

If you are not inclined to deny his request, then you can of course play the "equal authorship" card (which would certainly be nice of you, but... not correct, neither factual not moral). Unless you have formal limitation of what to write there, you could say something like ("$ME (first author), $THEM (programming)") or something along these lines. But in all honesty, you should put it the way it happened. You did author the paper, so you are the primary author. You can still go out of your way to praise the efforts of the student in a personal foreword, which may have equally large benefit for the student.

At the end, the advice of your supervisor is the most important: you have to decide. I could well imagine that he intends it as an exercise for yourself, to work on your moral compass and/or leadership skills, and maybe to drive home the point that these kinds of things should be specified beforehand.

(By the way, I think "moral" is the wrong word here; "ethics" would be the one. And in this context, above all, this is about honesty and objectivity, not about favours. That should be the nucleus of your own answer...)

Answer 5

If you defined the problem and did all of the mentoring, you could argue that you should be the last author on the paper (in some respects, a more prestigious position than first author as it traditionally represents the mentor/advisor). Is your advisor OK with that arrangement?

Answer 6

When in doubt, go with alphabetical order.

Having said that, you (OP) said in one of the comments:

Regardless of what my advisor thinks, I don't believe that the last position would benefit me as a graduate student.

If your advisor is even 'hinting' that you should take last position, then why are you even arguing?

Answer 7

In my field (biology) usualy the author who actually writes the paper is the first author. The one who leads the writing, the one who gathers comments from others and is responsible for the final text. So according to this it should be you.

Could it be that you have a fear of claiming what belongs to you? Out of a fear of disappointing him.

Some journals do allow to specify the equal contribution of first two authors.