Abstract
Authorship is intended to convey information regarding credit and responsibility for manuscripts. However, while there is general agreement within ecology that the first author is the person who contributed the most to a particular project, there is less agreement regarding whether being last author is a position of significance and regarding what is indicated by someone being the corresponding author on a manuscript. Here, I use a combination of a survey and an analysis of the literature to show that: 1) most ecologists view the last author as the “senior” author on a paper (that is, the person who runs the lab in which most of the work was carried out), 2) 82% of papers published in 2016 in the first and/or second issues of American Naturalist, Ecology, and Evolution had the first author as corresponding author, and 3) most ecologists view the corresponding author as the person taking full responsibility for a paper. However, there was substantial variation in views on authorship, especially corresponding authorship. Given these results, I suggest that discussions of authorship have as their starting point that the first author will be corresponding author and the senior author will be last author, while noting that it will be necessary in some cases to deviate from these defaults.