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Establish who wants to be an author

It is worth considering that not everyone on the same research project or in the same community will have the same motivation when it comes to authorship. Not everyone places the same importance on academic citation rates and therefore this is an issue that needs to be considered at the start of a project.

Strong motivation There will be team members that are focused on an academic career path and feel paper authorship is a driving force for career progression. They will put high importance on being an author and probably will also have strong opinions on how they want authorship to be attributed and what order authors names should take.

Medium motivation Other team members, probably more established academics who already have a substantial amount of publications and in stable employment, may be less worried about the order of authors on their papers or how contributions are attributed and tracked.

Low motivation Team members that are not interested in a purely academic career but still are an integral part of the team and have made substantial contributions to the project, such as research engineers, may not be interested in authorship at all.

Encourage a culture of ethical and equitable authorship

There may be unethical practices that exist in your discipline, or even in your institution, but this does not mean that you have to follow them. You can implement a more ethical and equitable authorship approach in your own research.

Plan an authorship strategy early on in a project

The earlier that authorship is discussed, the more awareness project members will have. This will hopefully lead to less conflict about authorship when it comes to the paper writing stage of the project.

It is not good practice to wait until you have finished writing a paper to have these discussions and this could lead to a lot of problems.

Make the authorship policy and agreement part of onboarding

It is likely that you will have new members join your project at different stages and it is important that you make the authorship policy known to them during onboarding.

Revisit the authorship policy before you start to write each article

Each article from a project may not have the same authorship due to the specialist nature of certain types of publications and different aspects of a project.