Who writes papers?
There are no actual rules about the order of authorships of papers in academic journals. All of Nature journals, Cell journals, and Science journals leave it to the authors as a group to decide their order.
As a culture, academic natural sciences have internally developed norms and expectations for positions in the author list. Typically, the first author drives the project and tend to write most of the actual text of a paper. As an academic career progresses, the incentives change from executing projects and writing, to supervising trainees. So most primary (and most visible) authors of scientific papers are are trainees.
I was wondering what the breakdown was between PhD candidates and postdoctoral scholars as primary authors of scientific papers.
By using OpenAlex to sample 1,400 papers from Nature, Cell, and Science -family journals (and bioRxiv) we can learn this. These papers were selected to have ORCID assignments for the first author, and from that the career stage of that first author (at the time of publication) can be extracted.
Generally, twice as many first-authorships are from postdoctoral scholars. Nature Biotechnology and bioRxiv are slight outliers, with roughly equal first author contributions from PhD students and postdoctoral scholars.
I was surprised from the data how many articles are first-authors by principal investigators. This might reflect review articles and perspectives, I didn’t do any explicit filtering for this.
Another interesting pattern I hadn’t been expecting was a gradient in the number of PI -first author papers depending on the scientific field. Medicine (e.g., Nature Medicine and Science Translational Medicine) has a larger than average fraction of papers first-authored by PIs. Journals focused on chemistry (Nature Chemical Biology, Cell Chemical Biology) have lower than average papers first-authored by PIs.
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