Co-Authorship Credit: Beyond First and Last Names

In some clinical disciplines the first and last positions communicate prominent roles. Other disciplines list names alphabetically or use consortia, shared first authorship and other conventions. A ranker should not silently force one field's rules onto another.

Statements describing conceptualisation, methodology, investigation, formal analysis or supervision can clarify what authors actually did. They require careful handling because not every journal has collected them and historical records may be incomplete.

Full counting credits each co-author with a work; fractional counting divides some measure among authors. Neither approach perfectly captures intellectual contribution. Any published score should describe its counting policy.

Assess the work and declared roles when available rather than assuming that a large number of co-authored items indicates independent leadership or that later-name authors contributed little.