Lead author

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Short description: First named author of a publication

In academic publishing, the lead author or first author is the first named author of a publication such as a research article or audit.

Academic authorship standards vary widely across disciplines. In many academic subjects, including the natural sciences, computer science and electrical engineering, the lead author of a research article is typically the person who carried out the research and wrote and edited the paper. The list of trailing co-authors reflects, typically, diminishing contributions to the work reported in the manuscript. Sometimes, journals require statements detailing each author's contributions to be included in each publication.[1] In other disciplines (such as mathematics) however, authors are typically listed alphabetically rather than by contribution.[2][3]

The proportion of multi-author papers has increased in recent decades, reflecting increasingly complex multi-investigator research projects,[4] as well as the "publish or perish" culture of academic performance evaluation.

See also

References

  1. "Editorial: What did you do? Nature Physics now requires a statement of authors' contributions to a paper", Nature Physics 5: 369, 2009, doi:10.1038/nphys1305 .
  2. 2004 Statement on The Culture of Research and Scholarship in Mathematics: Joint Research and Its Publication, American Mathematical Society, 2004, http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStatement04.pdf .
  3. Andrew Appel (January 1992). "Is POPL Mathematics or Science?". http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/science.pdf. 
  4. Weltzin, J. F.; Belote, R. T.; Thomas, L. M.; Keller, J. K.; Engel, C. E. (2006), "Authorship in ecology: attribution, accountability, and responsibility", Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 4 (8): 435–441, doi:10.1890/1540-9295(2006)4[435:AIEAAA2.0.CO;2], https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=sees_articles