the most common way of assigning authorship and the order of those authors on the manuscript usually depends on their “intellectual contributions”. However, this is usually a murky gray area and rarely made explicit about what actually merits a significant contribution to the project.
Liboiron, et al. offer their approach to creating equity in authorship, which considers social standings of individuals (authorship order may have more impact for some folks), amount of care work, and group consensus.
In practice, members discuss contributions of each other in the form of acknowledging each others work. This serves the purpose to thank each other and reinforce the values of the lab (especially the more invisible contributions like care work) | care work is valued work.
- I really like this model but it also sounds challenging and requires delicate intention when having these discussions.