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    Note that "time spent" isn't the proper measure of academic contribution.
    – Buffy
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 15:54
  • 1
    @Buffy No, certainly not, but in most things biomedicine it's a pretty good proxy of who is the first author on a paper. It would definitely be unfair treatment to a student who spent two years doing experiments to say "well, us senior people decided the direction and trained you how to do the experiments and told you to do an ANOVA, so we made all the intellectual contribution and you can be a middle author, we'll be first and last."
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 15:56
  • Hmmm, there is "time" and there is "productive activity" which may take time. But it is possible to spend a lot of time fruitlessly, probably even in biomedical research.
    – Buffy
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 15:59
  • 4
    @shukurra If it's primarily your project, you should probably be first author, whatever additional effort from you that means. "She came to all the discussions and made really good suggestions and comments while I was performing the analysis. So definitely intellectual contributions. And I will use her calculations to make a whole story for sure." - these all seem to be great marks of coauthorship, not first authorship.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 16:17
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    @shukurra Sorry, I think Buffy and I have drifted off on a bit of a tangent. My main messages to you are 1) if it's your project, you should be the first author. 2) If to be first author you need to write the whole paper, then that's what you should do, even if it takes longer. 3) It's totally fine for a coauthor to write parts of the manuscript, no matter where they are in the author order, but of course it's up to that coauthor to agree to do that work while being whatever order author they are.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 16:22