The order of authorship can turn out to be a conflict between coauthors in the academia. I have seen many of these cases.
It is usually quite hard to evaluate the contributions by different coauthors, especially when all of them make efforts to improve the paper. For example, they may discuss about the central argument of the paper; one of them may provide baseline results of the paper, which stimulate later revisions; advisors usually revise some of their students' papers before submitting to a journal. In sum, it is hard to differentiate between their contributions to the ideas, analyses, and even the writing of the paper.
The only way I can think of is to make it clear at the beginning about who will be the first author, such that coauthors involved have expectations about how much efforts they should put into the project.
It is usually quite hard to evaluate the contributions by different coauthors, especially when all of them make efforts to improve the paper. For example, they may discuss about the central argument of the paper; one of them may provide baseline results of the paper, which stimulate later revisions; advisors usually revise some of their students' papers before submitting to a journal. In sum, it is hard to differentiate between their contributions to the ideas, analyses, and even the writing of the paper.
The only way I can think of is to make it clear at the beginning about who will be the first author, such that coauthors involved have expectations about how much efforts they should put into the project.
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