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This is in the field of life sciences, i.e. a field in which the order of authors is not determined randomly but reflects author contributions (whatever that means); in other words, being first author is better than being second, which is better than third etc - except for the very last authors, who are generally the lab heads.

We're publishing a paper and two teammates have a disagreement on the order in which their names should be listed. We basically explored several strategies that were at the time all quite reasonable, so there was really no way to determine if one made more sense than another. We found that testing strategies one by one rigorously (one person per hypothesis to validate/debunk) was the most productive way to move forward. Our paper describes several mechanisms that we demonstrated could work for a certain problem.

Team member A tested several hypotheses, including one of the four that made it to the final paper.

Team member B tested more hypotheses (they were working on the project full-time, as opposed to A), and demonstrated that they were not scalable / valid strategies for our purposes. Interesting, useful for us, but not paper-worthy.

Each one of them has a pretty strong claim for having a better authorship position:

Teammate A designed and 100% tested one of the strategies that did work and that we chose to report in the paper, so their contribution is quite obvious. On the other hand teammate B spent more time on the project, debunked working hypotheses (not publishable but it had to be done at some point) and helped with the validation of other designs that worked - a contribution of 40-50% of the work on two different parts of the project.

Obviously results include a part of chance (picking the correct hypothesis/molecule/group/dataset), but time spent on the project is not a perfect metric either (working smart matters more than working long hours).

Without asking for a definite answer, how do you generally weight the importance of "what the paper shows in the end" vs. "the important but not article-worthy preliminary work"? In other words, how do you measure "contribution"? I would like to come up with a rational and objective way to determine who contributed more significantly - at least by the journal's standards.

In my field, this would clearly be shared (first) authorship.

As for the exact positions, in my experience one of A and B would also have been spending a lot of time as a de facto project lead that determines the course of the project and does most of the writing. In fact, in my field this would almost always be B, unless A somehow has the capabilities of effectively leading multiple projects and delegating vast proportions of the work in those projects.

I don't place a lot of value on happening to find the right solution for a problem. The way you describe this, it seems almost stochastic: A proposed four solutions and got lucky, B proposed more solutions but didn't get lucky. Obviously the situation and value of contributions changes if B could not have found the solution, but A (possibly because of greater experience) could have.

Two other considerations: first, exact position on a paper can have very different values for different people. A first first authorship can be absolutely vital for scientists who are rounding off their PhD or postdoc, whereas scientists who aren't rounding off could also obtain this in a next project. Second, maybe there are ways to even out the author contributions? One way would be to do another project together and flip author positions for that one. Another way would be that the person who doesn't get author precedence can present the work at conferences for the first year. And maybe there are better ideas that someone in your lab can come up with.

I think the explorations that failed can be as valuable as the one that succeeded, and should be reported along with the success.

See What to do when you spend several months working on an idea that fails in a masters thesis?

This argues for B as lead author. which, along with the fact that they worked harder/longer might settle the question.

(I am fortunate that in mathematics the convention is alphabetical order.)

Weighting contributions in a fair way can be all but impossible. As you noticed, contribution is a vector with many dimensions (time, effort, results, novelty, and whatnot). All attempts on sorting complex contributions on a single dimension axis will need agreement

• not only about the respective extent (which is difficult to measure),




• but also about the weighting of the elements (which needs mutual consent, as there is no "correct" answer).

If the authors disagree about ordering of their names, they are obviously assuming different matrices for projecting the contribution vectors to a one-dimensional value (or are greedy).

To resolve conflicts like these, you can always mention the authors in alphabetical order - maybe including the dept. chair (and add a tiny notice to the paper in order to show you did that).

If we took a generic view of research, it could be argued that both positive and negative results can be worthy of the top billing. However, each paper usually has a single focus. Whoever's work is most closely associated with that focus would be the lead author; everyone else provides substantiating or supporting material.

From that perspective, Person A sounds like the lead author and Person B is a supporting author - although perhaps worthy of special mention in the acknowledgements, subject to faculty policies on acknowledging authors in papers they authored. It might seem unfair to the work B put in, but if B's contribution is "not publishable" as you put it, it would seem odd to publish the work with B as lead author.

Who actually wrote more of the paper? If there's a measurable difference in terms of who put how much down on the page, then the person who wrote more gets authorship priority. Nothing gets published until the paper is written, so this can be a good and equitable tie-breaker in this kind of scenario.

You have answered your own question: 'working smart matters more than working long hours.' In your example you state one person 'made a contribution of 40-50% of the work on two different parts of the project', presumably less than the other person. This is telling.

The only metric that is accepted is the contribution to published work. This is supported by the fact that we never include all the contributions by people which made a publication possible; if so then your authorship would be several billion names long [reference every paper written since the mid-20th century].