Does sharing first authorship on a paper carry a penalty? What the research says

Study dispels myth that order of names in a paper’s author list dictates perception of success

A second-place slot on a paper’s author list did not reduce a co-first author’s perceived academic competence, a study found. Credit: Getty

Who gets to be first? The question of whether a paper should have more than one first author can lead to fraught negotiations. And the discussions can be just as thorny when deciding which of two first authors is named in the very first slot.

But new results might help to take the edge off such discussions. Research published last month in the journal Scientometrics suggests that there is no reputational penalty for shared first authorships, even for the person named second ― at least under experimental conditions¹.

“There was no disadvantage of sharing credit. That wasn’t something we expected to find,” says Miriam Schilbach, a co-author of the study and an organizational psychologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She and her co-lead author — organizational psychologist Julian Decius at the University of Bremen, Germany — determined whose name would be listed first by rolling dice. (Decius won.)

Up first is...

Authorship is the currency of academic life, and first authorship of a prestigious publication can make or break a career. The stakes are so high that in 2002, two molecular biologists in Germany ended up in court over changed author positions.

As research projects become more complex and require a greater range of skills, the practice of sharing the top name slot, known as shared first authorship, is increasing. This has raised concerns that the co-author listed first gets the most kudos and that sharing first authorship is deemed less significant than heading the pack on your own.

To test such ideas, Decius and Schilbach created a CV for a fictitious experimental physicist named Kim Mueller. They recruited a panel of roughly 170 researchers outside physics — mostly academics with psychology and management backgrounds — to evaluate the CV. They told the panellists that Mueller was an applicant for an assistant professorship and their top three articles were published in prestigious experimental-physics journals.

The pair then randomly assigned to each panel member one of four versions of Mueller’s CV. In each version, Mueller was listed on all three papers as either sole first author, second author, joint first author listed first or joint first author listed second.

Each panellist was then asked to rank six aspects of Mueller’s academic success, such as their likelihood of becoming editor of a journal over the next five years. The panel members were also asked to estimate Mueller’s h-index, a common metric reflecting the impact of someone’s publications.

Sharing the credit

On average, the panellists judged Mueller higher on all six aspects of academic success when the fictious physicist was the sole first author than when they were second author — confirming the importance of first authorship.