Credit among Co-authors
Pat is an engineer and a member of a research and development team composed of engineers from several fields of engineering, including materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, and biomedical engineering, working with some molecular biologists and physicians to develop a new implantable drug. The team members have agreed on the default expectation (the expectation to be fulfilled unless some strong reasons are given for behaving differently) that the order of the names on the author list of co-authored papers will reflect the discipline of the publication for which the paper is written. For example, normally any paper for a chemical engineering journal would have the chemical engineer as the first author and she would initiate the writing of that paper with whichever collaborators had relevant knowledge. Any publication for a prestigious publication that crosses disciplines, such as SCIENCE or Nature, will normally list the authors in alphabetical order. In all publications the work of any team members who are not co-authors will be cited or acknowledged wherever relevant.
How adequate and responsible are these agreements about credit? What alternative expectations, if any, do such teams commonly work out ahead of time and how do they compare with the ones stated?
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