February 2022

What Does it Mean to be First Author?

This is a deceptively easy question.

It’s the person who got the grant funding to support the project! Or is it the person who did the most work? Or is it the person who wrote most of the paper? Perhaps the person who designed the research collection and methods?

Fairly quickly this question gets muddled.

This doesn’t even get into the intergroup politics of deciding on a set of criteria (*if* this happens) and then figuring out an equitable way to discuss authorship ordering.

I want to add a caveat that discipline norms play a huge role in determining the authorship order and many times first author isn’t the most coveted position. However, the question stands: how do you determine who will be primarily associated with this paper?

This conversation arose during the tail end of my second year in my PhD program. While I had been a part of research papers before, I was a research assistant and was never leading projects. However, I now found myself leading two group research projects and having to contemplate this important question. Expectedly, I had wholly focused on the research pipeline and associated labor, but I hadn’t considered the (mostly) unseen labor that supports the research process.

The research process is long and messy. While it would be ideal if we could follow a simple script of reading, creating research questions, collecting data, analyzing data, and writing up the publication, this is simply not the case. Not only are those parts much messier and more interconnected, but there is also a myriad of tasks that allow a research project to exist, persist, and be completed (on time).

It is that labor that is the subject of this post.

When you lead a research project, there are many tasks that you will be expected to complete, but that you didn’t know of or are prepared to complete. Through discussions with my advisers and colleagues, here are *some* of those tasks:

• • Assembling a team
  • Managing the team dynamic
  • Creating timelines and milestones
  • Selecting the conference or journal for submission
  • Making tough calls when things go wrong
  • Managing a disruption to the team
  • Making the final call for difficult discussions
  • Making sure the paper fits specifications for the submission
  • Being the point of contact for the conference/journal
  • Managing R&R
  • Presenting the paper
  • Managing the reception of the paper

This is a lot of work! Very little of which relies on the research skillset we are developing as graduate students.

Yes, few (hopefully) first authors do all of these tasks on their own. However, the point stands: the most important responsibility of the first author is to make sure the paper is completed and submitted on time.

Does it actually work this way? Certainly not! At least not always. Work is stolen and appropriated every day. Prestige of an author can overshadow contributions. Difficult collaborators. The myriad of human problems that exist in any collaboration.

Even when working with good teams, this labor can be obscured and even when made more visible, isn’t taken seriously as contributions to the research process. However, knowing what this role can look like and the amount of labor to do it well can change the ways we negotiate this role and contributions to science more broadly.

So, how do we come to terms with the highlighted question and reality?

A Case Study

I am a part of a fairly large lab. There are multiple ongoing projects with a nice mix of grad students, post-docs, staff, and faculty. While working on another project in the lab, I noticed a trend in some comment data during exploratory data analysis. I took that observation (user arguments around science on YouTube) and began building out possible research questions and reading literature.

Later during the semester, I proposed this project at a group lab meeting hoping to get some help.

Our team was assembled and I setup a recurring weekly meeting to check-in. During these meetings, I would describe my research vision and research questions. From there, I would break up the most pressing tasks to each member (including myself). One person working on the literature review and two people working on data collection. Our faculty adviser was working in a supervisory role for this project.

All was going quite well. We had clear goals, were making solid iterative process, and team members were bringing up great questions about the research design. Each week we would get a little more data, more clarity on what our contribution was, and discuss any disagreements or changes.

And then, I faltered.

We were cross-comparing user comments on Reddit and YouTube, and I was in charge of data collection and preprocessing for YouTube. Two weeks had gone by with little substantive progress made.

It was at this point (luckily) that our faculty adviser stepped in and said, to paraphrase, “We aren’t expecting you to know how to do this your first time. We are all here to help, so it’s okay to lean on us.”

There is a level of embarrassment when your shortcomings are brought to bear. While I internally felt awful (accountability often does), the way the situation was handled made things much easier to reorient my next steps.

While I knew the methods in and out and had the skills to do the work, it really was a misunderstanding about what my role was and what expectations were associated with it. What I was attempting to do was unsustainable.

I was taking on many of those tasks listed above while also attempting be an equal participant in the research tasks.

I spoke with a colleague of mine who is faculty at another institution but is familiar with my program for perspective. He reiterated in no uncertain terms the importance and value of leadership labor. Yes, it may not be the nitty-gritty of data cleaning and analysis, but it ultimately is the determining factor for whether the paper is finished, submitted on time, and is quality.

And that’s enough.

Moving forward, I leaned into my role. I upped the level and quality of my interactions with my teammates and leaned into work that I could manage and had more experience with. I am by no means removed from the research process directly, but I have taken a step back and am leaning on my talented teammates to do what they do best.

The Final Word

When you lead a research project, you often are in charge of the vision and design of the project. Through the process of divvying up tasks and supporting each team member, you gain a holistic understanding of the work. You often make the decisions that must be defended within the paper and to reviewers. So, it is more important to do this role well than overextend and do multiple roles insufficiently.

Perhaps the most valuable takeaway from this process is that you have people on your team for a reason. They are experts at their craft and you are best suited letting them do their work. Academia actively pushes people into very narrow forms of expertise. It is okay to not have every skill for every project. Play your role and trust that your colleagues will do the same.