Writing a topical review paper with co-author(s) Let assume a journal accepted a topical review proposal I submitted. It's often a good approach for a student like me (PhD student) to coauthor the paper with a more experienced researcher who is quite known in the field. In my previous papers, when was the first author, I wrote the whole paper and asked for feedback from the coauthors at the end of the writing (since they contributed in the experimental data acquisition for example, but not on the research development).
For the specific case of a topical review, I wonder how the coauthoring is done in practice ? Are the coauthors expected to write some parts of the review ?
Who does the actual &quot;writing&quot; (i.e. putting pen to paper or fingers to keys) is actually immaterial. I've published with half a dozen people where everything was &quot;written&quot; by one person, since he is (by far) the best writer in the group. He chose the words and the sentence structure.  But the ideas came primarily from two other people and the rest of us contributed ideas from our own experience. The &quot;writer&quot; synthesized all of that into a nice expressive form. But without the rest of us he wouldn't have been able to do it.
Authorship is (or should be) about intellectual contributions, not physical manipulations of keyboards or even of experimental equipment.
At the other end of the scale, I've written books with major publishers and worked with a copy_editor who helped with some of my (occasionally!!) awkward syntax. In no such case would anyone expect that their contributions were authorship.