Deciding authorship order

Authorship of academic papers has become increasingly problematic in recent years. Many ambitious studies require large consortia in which the contributions of individuals are difficult to discern from a simple list of authors,1 leading some groups to do without authors altogether and others to call for wholesale reform of the system.2 3 Funding decisions place increasing reliance on publication records, and research quality measures place particular weight on authors’ positions.4 This can lead to many problems.5 Authors can be jostled out of their deserved position by the spurious elevation of minor contributors to the prestigious last (senior) authorship position.6 Confusing attempts to share credit can also occur through use of the inevitably misleading phrase “these authors contributed equally to this work.”7

Human interaction in many fields encounters the problem of how to allocate a perceived future reward. We report one solution originating …