We think that author ordering in publications is a complex topic that can lead to conflict and unethical behavior (e.g. adding author names in the middle of the author list because it is not an important position).
As a team, we have decided to favor alphabetical order to prevent such conflicts and possible misbehavior.
However, we are fully aware that the contributions of each authors are not equal both in terms of time investment as in terms of role. For this reason, we have decided to systematically add an author statement at the end of each of our publication, or in the hal preprint corresponding to the publication if we lack space due to page restriction. Such statement is mainly based on the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) author statement that has its origin in [AOK18]. Among the possible roles one can use :
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Conceptualization | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims |
| Methodology | Development or design of methodology; creation of models |
| Software | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components |
| Validation | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/ reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs |
| Formal analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data |
| Investigation | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection |
| Resources | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools |
| Data Curation | Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse |
| Writing – Original Draft | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation) |
| Writing – Review & Editing | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre-or postpublication stages |
| Visualization | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation |
| Supervision | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team |
