Published: Jul 30, 2024 by Yihao Liu

Notes on Authorship

The past few years as a PhD student have been an incredible journey. As I began mentoring young graduate students, I felt a strong need to share carefully chosen advice and ideas to help pass on meaningful experience. At the core of this guidance is to encourage students to take full ownership and become champions of their projects. But an important question arises in this context—one that’s often on everyone’s mind: how to properly assign credit in research papers.

While I adhere to established conventions within the research community, I also follow some personal principles:

• If I initiated the idea, significantly contributed, and remained actively involved throughout the project, I take on the role of corresponding author. As long as the work is completed successfully, I focus less on my position in the author list, understanding that ranking often matters more to my mentees.
• If I initiated the idea, contributed over 50% of the work, I take the first author position, and most of the time also corresponding author.

I frequently get asked about my approach to authorship in interviews, so I thought it would be useful to share these principles openly here. Generally, I highlight on my resume only those papers where I played an active role, usually as the first or corresponding author.