In academic research, there is a particular kind of cruelty that comes dressed as kindness.

It sounds like this: “This project is yours. You are the de facto lead. This project is like your child. You are doing well.” It sounds like recognition, like being seen. These acknowledgements bolster our spirits as young researchers.

But (in)equity in authorships happens in the soft spaces — in assumptions about hierarchy, in unstated expectations, in the quiet understanding that the person who holds the grant also holds the first position on the paper, regardless of who did what.

Early career researchers like me (particularly those working in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) settings) disproportionately on short-term contracts — are systematically placed in lower authorship positions regardless of their contribution. In general, we are often dependent on references, promotions, and publications for our next opportunity — absorb this understanding quickly as if a single person holds the power to define our professional standing. Evidence suggests that women are more likely to report negative experiences related to authorship decisions which made them difficult to deal with.  

The above-mentioned realities raise a question worth sitting with:

When one individual's appraisal holds this much power over our trajectories, does the system itself suppress our ability to stand against inequity?

And we are coerced to learn that something is better than nothing. That any place in the authorship order is still a publication.

This is not always malicious. Sometimes it is simply the reproduction of a system that nobody has stopped to question. When we ask for what we deserve, we are reminded of how privileged we are to have received such exposure at such a young age, and how they did not. How, in their time, the injustice of a senior person claiming first authorship was simply normalised — something they believe we are no longer forced to endure. How they could have just said no to what I expected or asked, but instead “provided me the space to discuss" — as though that itself was a “favor” granted to me. We carry projects from conception to completion from writing the initial protocol to spend time in the field, managing & coding the data. In addition, we write the first draft, and the second, and sometimes the third after repetitive iteration. And we do it all on the strength of verbal acknowledgement — praise offered freely.

But if we are constantly reminded of what used to happen a decade ago, and if the very argument for our generation is that we should learn faster than a senior researcher did in their 30s or 40s — then why can we not also demand faster justice? Why must we inherit their silences along with their institutions?

Why should the acknowledgment of past unfairness not lead to a more equitable present?

In many research settings, authorship and intellectual contribution criteria often appear more flexible when applied to senior researchers or collaborators especially when maintaining professional relationships may be perceived as strategically important for future collaborations and opportunities. In contrast, we frequently find that the same criteria are interpreted far more rigidly to decide our position our authorship order which in turn taking our due credit away. At times, we are reminded of the "opportunities" we have received through our involvement in a project, such as presenting at conferences, gaining exposure to new methods, network, or learnings from research activities. While these opportunities are valuable and can contribute significantly to professional development, they should not be framed as “substitutes” for fair recognition of intellectual contributions.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) are useful in disaggregating the contribution and providing us the right to authorship. However, the criteria just set a threshold for who qualifies as an author but say nothing about how authors should be ordered once the threshold is met. The ordering, which carries the most weight professionally is entirely to convention, negotiation, or, in practice, hierarchy.

Neither framework captures the volume of work someone performed in a project. For example,  two individuals can both be listed under data curation, one who just stood there and facilitated the data collection process while another not only supported data collection but also spent months manually entering paper-based data into spreadsheets, cleaning it, and coding it for analysis. The taxonomy flattens this into the same tick which is concerning and causes injustice to the latter. There is no mechanism for recording proportionality, burden, or the sheer column of work that one person may have shouldered relative to others.

Neither framework accounts for the reality that in hierarchical research environments — particularly in LMICs and early career contexts — authorship order is frequently decided by the most senior person. The person who did most of the work may have no seat at that table.

CRediT taxonomy is widely adopted across medical journals. And it still relies on the corresponding author to confirm that all authors meet the criteria. There is no independent verification. The system, as it stands, trusts the person with the most power to accurately represent the contributions of the person with the least.

What would actually change things is structural: mandatory contributor statements verified independently, not self-reported by the person with the most power in the team. Institutional authorship policies with grievance mechanisms that early career researchers can access without fear of retaliation (by maintaining anonymity). Journal editors who treat authorship disputes as integrity issues, not interpersonal conflicts to be resolved quietly before submission. And critically,  a revision to existing frameworks that recognizes volume and time as dimensions of contribution that matter. Not every hour of research work is equal, but the researcher who gave hundreds of hours to a project is not the same as the one who gave 50. That difference should be visible somewhere in the record. A fairer academic environment will require both structural reforms and cultural change, including transparent authorship processes, meaningful recognition of early-career researchers' contributions, and equitable participation in research decision-making.