Authorship and Publication Expectations

These authorship policies are intended as guidelines, not rigid rules. In all cases, authorship should be discussed case by case. Decisions should be generous, substantive, and grounded in mutual trust among collaborators.

Authorship Criteria and Contributions

• First author (or co-first authors) are those who form the driving force behind completion of the project. This includes all or a major part of:

  • intellectual design and execution of the project,

  • evaluation and discussion of experimental results,

  • writing of the manuscript.

• Equal contribution means equal contribution. There is no qualifying element in the name order of co-first authors, with one exception: on papers with outside collaborators, we often prefer to have the first co-first author and the last senior author not be from the same lab, to demonstrate entanglement of the contributing teams.

• All other authors are those who contributed to completion of the project. Contributions may include:

  • providing essential reagents (for example, antibodies or cell lines),

  • providing hardware or software (for example, microscopes or computational analysis algorithms),

  • generating a select set of experimental results and writing related parts of the Experimental Methods,

  • intellectual input that significantly advances the project.

There are no courtesy authorship appointments on papers from the Dean Lab.

Responsibilities of Authors

• In all author configurations, all authors are expected to read, comment on, and actively sign off on submissions.

• In case of authorship disagreement, the manuscript is not submitted until the disagreement is resolved through dialogue and constructive discussion.

• The first listed author is responsible for sharing manuscript reviews immediately upon receipt. This is usually followed by a meeting where all authors can reflect on critiques.