Some years ago I was asked to mediate a heated dispute between a postdoc and a graduate student in my lab. Both agreed that they should be authors of a report of an experiment, but they disagreed about who should be first author. Resolving this dispute led me to devise a set of criteria for determining who should be an author and the order of the authors. I posted these criteria on our website, which made all the difference. Going forward, in the few instances where contributors disagreed, simply discussing these criteria invariably resolved the issue.

In my lab, we consider six specific criteria and assign points to each; often the points for each phase are divided among several people. The point totals for each phase should be discussed – and possibly adjusted – as part of this process. For example, some projects use standard designs (e.g., a “Stroop” task) or analyses (e.g., correlations), in which case the number of points for that phase should be reduced.

The following are “default” point values, with a total of 1,000. Points are assigned based on creative contributions to a specii c phase. Points for each phase are divided among authors in proportion to their creative contribution to that phase of the project. The ordering of authorship is determined by the relative number of points.