We are currently hosting in our labs an "international"international postgraduate student on a 12-month exchange visit. We have had students from the same university before without any issues.
We have completed all the modelling, analysis, results etc for an article and we are in the last round of reviews before submission with an agreed author order for the five contributors in the article. However, the exchange administrator from the overseas university has requested that their "local"local supervisor be listed as a second author as well as a corresponding author to the submission otherwise the publication will not be counted towards the student work from the university (and will affect scholarship rankings etc). Oddly enough, the supervisor has agreed to the original author order but the admin person has not budged so far.
Given that in the "foreign"foreign country where the student is from, first and second authorships are considered important, what would be the best way to convince the administrator about the current author order? Or should we avoid conflicts that might affect the student's scholarship applications and chances and accept the change?
