Research paper authorship as an undergraduate: how does it happen?

molliebatmit
Sun, 02 Aug 2009 09:51:03 +0000

Hey, you still have to contribute significantly to the paper to be 5th author! Authorship isn’t just this honorary thing you get after working in a lab for a certain amount of time – honorary authorship is considered highly unethical.

I was published as an undergrad, so I can tell you how it worked for me. (Well, technically, the paper didn’t get published until I was a second-year graduate student, but the paper was submitted when I was a junior.) When I was a sophomore, I started working in a lab, and there was a certain part of a project that was basically mine. I did the work, and got the results, and my postdoc and I analyzed it together. When the paper was submitted, my work was a central cornerstone of the results, so I was an author on the paper.