[jltsiren]

Authorship conventions vary a lot within the academia. In general, the closer the name is to either end of the author list, the more significant their contributions likely were.

Things also vary from paper to paper. Sometimes the first author just did the actual work for somebody else, and sometimes they also made significant intellectual contributions. (If the first author is listed as the sole corresponding author, it usually indicates the latter.) Sometimes the last/senior author just brought the money in, sometimes they were primarily mentoring the first author, and sometimes they were the driving force behind the project.

[screye]

Yep, in ML, the head of the lab is always last author.... even if it was equal contribution work with their own PhD student.

The PhD student needs the street cred a lot more than a tenured PI.

[jltsiren]

In some fields and some situations, last-author papers are actually more valuable than first-author papers. A first-author paper tells that you are capable of working as a junior researcher, while a last-author paper is a signal of your success as a senior researcher.

I once had a paper where I shared first authorship with four other people. That implies that the project was large enough that different people were in charge of different subprojects. Which in turn implies that the senior author must have made major contributions by being in charge of the entire project.

[derbOac]

This is getting off-topic, but I've given up making heads or tails of authorship.

I know senior authors who are last on a paper just because they're senior and realize they (1) didn't really contribute much at all (they might have just inserted themselves on a paper), and (2) invoke the old meaning of last author knowing that the meaning has changed, so they end up being "the senior author" who gets a lot of credit just because they're senior.

Even producing the data takes on new meaning in an age of open science where datasets are distributed freely. What's the difference between citing an original study paper to give credit to the study PIs, and having them as a last author? Should someone who generates a dataset be last author on every paper using that data?

Sigh. Academics is so broken.

[gillesjacobs]

> In general, the closer the name is to either end of the author list, the more significant their contributions likely were.

In ML, NLP, and many Humanities too, the supervisor (supervising professor/postdoc, lab head, PI) is put last regardless of contribution. The rest of the author list is ranked in descending order for contribution. Often the last author's contributions are very limited to obtaining funding or proof-reading.

Now this practice is controversial with many venues stating that obtaining funding and only supervising is not a valid reason for authorship, but in my experience this practice doesn't die out.