## Authorship Authorship is an important part of scientific work: it denotes credit but also responsibility! An author on a paper is someone who has made a sustained, intellectual contribution. Sustained contributions last for more than a single meeting - they mean having some part in the ongoing life of a project, including the writing of the manuscript. Sometimes people will join later in a project (even just for writing) but they will still typically engage more than once. Intellectual contributions involve putting in ideas, rather than just doing activities E.g., running subjects alone does not give authorship - but running subjects and providing insightful revisions to the paradigms on the basis of your observations can be an author-level contribution. Writing code is an intellectual contribution, but only if it's for this project (the paper will be the first/primary presentation). Writing a tool or collecting a dataset doesn't get you authorship on all subsequent projects using that tool/those data. We try to agree on authorship early in a project to avoid misunderstandings. All authors must approve a manuscript prior to it being submitted. In almost all cases, this should involve reading the ms and providing feedback. The exceptions will only be in cases e.g. where an undergraduate has contributed but left the field and we credit their contribution without expecting them to continue to contribute to the ms. All authors must know where the code and data are stored and be able to access them to verify claims in the paper. ### Conventions in our lab First author is lead, final author is senior supervisor, middle authors are ranked in terms of contribution. On a standard collaboration, the convention will typically be Student & Frank. This arrangement conveys that the student did the work under my supervision: they led the project, have primary responsibility. Other collaborators will typically be middle authors. We can use co-first authorship (denoted with *) for joint projects. But note that you still have to decide who's the "first first" author, so it doesn't completely solve the problem. Authorship discussions are especially important for cross-lab collaborations that may not share our conventions. ### Policy for interns and undergrads Interns and undergrads have often been authors and we encourage this. But they must meet the sustained and intellectual parts of the criterion. Typically this requires more than just a summer's worth of work. Interns that stay around the year after and contribute to a paper are typically authors. Those who leave and do not stay involved are typically not. Honors students are always authors (even if not always lead) on papers reporting their honors work ### Other points My goal is for students to take ownership and lead projects I will typically only be lead author if I initiated and did much of the work on the project, or if a student really doesn't want to or can't write a paper. If you leave the lab, data are important/need to be published, and you fail to make progress on a paper after repeated promptings/discussion, I may ask whether I can finish the writeup.