List of authors in scholarly publications: Sequence and what value?

Abstract

Multidisciplinary collaborations and active participation of multiple authors in scientific studies and publications are being increasingly encouraged. This may be so because multi-author publications, presumably, have been considered to lend greater credibility, reliability, greater support, and enhance the integrity of the work as it will often reflect a pool of experiences and contributions from all the authors. When the article is finally published in a scientific journal, many other stakeholders’ interests will become obvious such as is found in the work often done by the appointment and promotion committee in real academic circles, where credits are now awarded to each author for the purpose of promotion, grant allocation, and assigning supervision by grant awarding firms are just but a few examples.[1] In these instances, surely, the stakeholders will pick interest in the order or sequence in which the list of authors names appear in the work. At this point, the question will then arise whether the list of authors’ names in scholarly publications has any particular sequence or value? If it does, what is the interpretation of the sequence? What value does it has and how do you quantify the value? These could be some of the questions that will follow particularly during assessment of the roles or contributions made by various authors in multi-authored publications. This editorial is intended to highlight the interpretation of the order or sequence of list of authors names in scholarly publications and attempt to give a summary of the guidelines that have been in use for the evaluation of the roles or contributions made by various authors. In scientific and scholarly publications, the roles of the first author has been wrongly misconstrue and thought that the person that has the greatest contribution to the work should be first author. With this misconception, that has been fairly straightforward in identifying such a role in any multi-author publication. The major problem is often with the remaining names, which factors guide the order in which the remaining names are arranged? As at the moment, no universally accepted order is practiced among scholars. However, the following options and guidelines have been noted to be in place or use for various reasons.