Should I ask to be moved up in the authorship list? This past summer, I started my undergraduate thesis project under two advisors. One of my advisors had done research on a similar topic to what my thesis project is covering and she had the data collected from their experiments. (For context, we are synthesizing anticancer molecules and testing them on cancer cell lines. In her research, they made different derivatives than me but with the same starting materials).
Since the two works require similar background knowledge, I was asked to write the paper for their research since I would be looking through articles anyways for my project. I wrote the entire paper and provided all analyses of the data (abstract, intro, results, discussion, experimental section) and my advisor provided comments for edits.
I am listed as the sixth author out of seven. Since I'm just an undergrad, I'm not sure how authorship works but I know that the people who contribute more to the project are earlier in the author list.
Based on your experiences, should I be earlier in the list or is this position common when someone writes the paper when they didn't contribute to the actual research? Obviously I know I shouldn't be first author but I feel like 6th/7 is pretty low for someone who wrote the whole paper. I'm not sure how to go about discussing this with my advisor.
More important than who &quot;wrote&quot; the paper is whose research and ideas it is based on. Who is responsible for the &quot;intellectual content&quot; of the work. But I agree that 6th is pretty low. Some fields are fanatical about author order. But you can ask. Ask, at least, for an explanation of the author order. Maybe it is rational, maybe not.
But for an undergraduate, any paper is a good thing and being associated with established researchers in print is especially good. So, even if it isn't exactly &quot;fair&quot;, it is still something that you can point to in the future. Not everyone has such a thing to help them get to the next level.
Sometimes, not very rational, an author will be &quot;high up&quot; in the list for no better reason than they need a particular boost at the moment to get a job or similar.