Download the authorder® table as a web page  or Excel spreadsheet

With all co-authors, as a group, complete the following steps to determine author order. The co-authors are those persons who meet the requirements of the Vancouver Protocol (read more about authorship protocols).

1.  Prepare a blank table with names of all co-authors.

Table 1: Blank authorder® table (view this table as a separate web page or download for Excel)

2.  Add to the first column of the table all items that comprised the manuscript (arrow I). Items are things such as manuscript writing, literature review, survey design, interview analysis, experimental results that lead to Figure 1 in the paper etc.

Table 2: Manuscript items

3.  Score how much each co-author contributed to each item as a percentage (arrow II). Consider critical preliminary work that led to the design of experiments presented in the manuscript. The ideas or concepts behind the research may best be considered last as relative contributions may be difficult to substantiate.  As authors may occasionally find it difficult to agree on exact percentages, a range may be assigned that the authors can “agree to disagree” on.

Table 3: Authors' contribution to each manuscript item

4.  Co-authors should assign categories that show the overall importance of each item to the manuscript (arrow III).  In this example, items with a Category A rating were most important to the manuscript, Category C items were least important, and Category B items were of intermediate importance to the whole manuscript. 

Table 4: Overall importance of manuscript items as categories

5.  Each category is then to be given a specific percentage weighting that represents the relative importance of that category (arrow IV).

Table 5: Weighting of items within each category

6.  Calculate each author’s relative contribution to the manuscript (arrow V).

Table 6: Weighted importance of each author's contribution

7.  Author order is then listed in descending order of percentage contributions. In this example, the author order on the manuscript would be Les (57.5%), John (14.25%), Carl (11%), Peta (10%), Mary (7.25%).