Shared first authorship

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Scholarly Communication
• Information Science

Background:

• Author name order traditionally signifies contributions (first author: primary contributor, last author: principal investigator).
• Journals vary in defining author roles and responsibilities.
• The rise of co-first authorship presents challenges to traditional interpretations of credit assignment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the increasing prevalence of co-first authorship in scientific publications.
• To discuss the challenges co-first authorship poses for academic librarians.
• To analyze the impact of co-first authorship on database searching and author metrics.

Main Methods:

• Commentary and analysis of current trends in scholarly publishing.
• Review of existing journal policies on author contributions.
• Discussion of implications for information retrieval and bibliometric analysis.

Main Results:

• Co-first authorship is an emerging trend that complicates traditional author credit systems.
• Academic librarians face new challenges in interpreting author contributions and metrics.
• Database search strategies may need adaptation to accurately reflect contributions in co-first authorship scenarios.

Conclusions:

• The trend of co-first authorship necessitates a re-evaluation of how author contributions are understood and represented.
• Clearer guidelines and standardized practices are needed to address co-first authorship.
• Future research should focus on developing effective methods for searching and evaluating research with co-first authors.