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ICMJE requires all four criteria — contribution, drafting or revising, final approval, and accountability. Collecting data alone does not qualify 7. For scoring, only the ends of the author list matter: general surgery counts first or senior author 1, urology pays half a point for second author and nothing from third onward 2.
The ethical test and the scoring test are different questions. ICMJE sets four criteria that must all be met: substantial contribution to conception, design, acquisition or analysis; drafting or critically revising the work; final approval; and agreement to be accountable for it 7. Acquiring funding, collecting data or general supervision alone do not confer authorship 7. That is the rule journals and universities enforce, and it is why "I collected all the data" arguments so often end badly.
Colleges score the ends of the list, not the middle. General surgery pays 2 points for first or last/senior author and 1 for anything else 1. Urology pays 2 for first author, 0.5 for second author only, and zero from third author onward 2. Vascular pays 1 for a non-first author on a paper with ten authors or fewer, dropping to 0.5 above ten and capped at one such paper 3. Neurosurgery counts first, co-first or senior author at 2 and second author at 1 4. OHNS resolves co-first authorship explicitly: two first authors score 1.0 each 5. RANZCO counts first or last author at up to 2 a paper and secondary authors at 0.25, capped at 0.5 across your whole career 6. So co-first authorship is real and scored; third author is not.
Fix it before you start. Agree the order in writing at the beginning of the project, by group email, because contribution is renegotiated under deadline pressure and the first author is usually the one proposing the split 8.
The counter-argument. In actual academic life the distinction between second, third and twelfth author is close to meaningless, and burning a collaboration over one slot costs you the next three papers 8. The scoring sheet disagrees with that only at second author.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
There are rules about authorship based on contribution. Different labs may have different 'rules' but at the end of the day, we're all expected to work to the guidelines on research and publication ethics.
Data collection, even if a substantial amount of work, is insufficient.
Authorship should be sorted out before you start working on a project.
in my experience in academia, if you're not first or last author, you're a 'middle author', and whether that's 2nd, 3rd or 12th in the list makes no difference really.
Asked 33 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /author(ship)?|second author|first author/i (a topic-level count; it also picks up 'competent authority pathway' threads). Quotes are the highest-scoring comments from the two authorship-dispute threads, with the two self-identified academics disagreeing about whether data collection earns a byline.