Co-Authoring Etiquette for Scientific Papers: A Guide

Q: Is it okay to use AI tools when co-writing a paper?

Yes, within the target journal's policies and with team agreement. Disclose the use as the journal requires, verify every claim and number against your actual data, and treat AI output as a draft that a responsible human author must own and check.

By Dr. Zubair Khalid, DVM, MS, PhD · 2026-11-11

Co-Authoring Etiquette for Scientific Papers: A Guide

Co-authoring etiquette is the set of written and unwritten rules that govern how researchers share credit, divide writing work, and communicate while preparing a scientific paper together. The core of it comes down to three habits: agree on authorship before drafting starts, divide the labor transparently, and keep every co-author informed from the first outline to the returned page proofs.

Most authorship conflicts are not caused by bad people. They are caused by assumptions that were never spoken aloud. This guide explains co-authoring etiquette for scientific papers in practical terms, with examples, scripts, and the norms that experienced research groups follow.

What Is Co-Authoring Etiquette for Scientific Papers?

Co-authoring etiquette covers the behavior expected of everyone who contributes to a manuscript. It is not a formal law of science. No international court punishes a rude email. Instead, etiquette is the working culture of scientific collaboration, and it shapes three things:

Credit. Who is listed as an author, in what order, and who is acknowledged instead of listed.
Work. Who writes which section, who runs the analysis, who formats the references, and how those tasks are tracked.
Communication. How decisions are made, how disagreements are raised, and how quickly people respond.

The term answers a simple question. When two or more people build one manuscript, what does each person owe the others? A first author owes the team a coherent draft. A senior author owes the team timely decisions and a fair account of who did what. A middle author owes the team the sections they promised and honest updates when a deadline slips.

Etiquette also extends to the boundaries of the paper itself. Training programs for new writers consistently identify the same weak points: understanding what plagiarism is, confidence in publishing, and the mechanics of manuscript structure [1]. Students report similar trouble spots, with more than half of surveyed biology education students naming the introduction and the results and discussion sections as their hardest writing tasks [2]. Etiquette means recognizing these gaps in yourself and in your co-authors, and planning around them instead of letting them fester.

Why Etiquette Matters in Scientific Collaboration

Modern papers are rarely solo products. A bibliographic survey of a single plant genus across 55 years found 183 articles produced by 160 authors spread over 36 countries, which shows how thoroughly scientific collaboration crosses labs and borders [3]. Multi-author work is the norm, and each added author multiplies the number of expectations that must be managed.

Training programs that teach scientific writing treat collaboration as a skill in its own right, not a side effect. International collaborative writing programs now pair educators across countries specifically to build cross-border publication partnerships and strengthen global scientific networks [4]. Community training in scientific writing has been shown to improve participants' grasp of paper structure and drafting, and one of its documented benefits was the collaborative interaction it created among participants, which built an academic culture around the writing itself [1]. In other words, people write better together when the relationship is managed deliberately.

Poor etiquette has a measurable cost. A co-author who feels slighted can delay a submission for months, withhold data, or file a complaint with a journal that stalls publication. A clear working agreement prevents most of that before it starts.

Authorship: Who Qualifies and Who Does Not

Authorship is the most contentious part of co-authoring etiquette, so it deserves the most attention.

The core criterion for authorship

The widely accepted standard across journals is simple to state. An author is someone who made a substantial contribution to the work, helped draft or critically revise the manuscript, approved the final version, and agrees to be accountable for the work. Anyone who contributed something useful but does not meet all of those elements should be acknowledged by name in an acknowledgments section rather than listed as an author.

This standard is treated as settled textbook knowledge in research training, but it is violated constantly in practice. The two most common violations run in opposite directions.

Gift or guest authors. People added who did not earn it, often a department head, a collaborator's famous friend, or a lab mate who did nothing. This misleads readers about who did the work.
Ghost authors. People who did substantial writing, often junior staff or professional writers, who are left off the list. This erases real contributions.

Both are considered misconduct by most journals. Etiquette-wise, the fix is the same for both: discuss the author list early, openly, and based on contributions rather than seniority or politics.

Author order

Author order conventions differ by field, and the etiquette move is to state your field's convention out loud at the start.

In most biomedical and life science fields, the first author did the largest share of hands-on work and writing. The last author, often the lab head, usually supervised the project and takes responsibility for its integrity. Middle authors contributed meaningfully but in smaller measure.
In some mathematics and economics traditions, authors are listed alphabetically.
Some journals and some teams now use a statement of equal contribution, such as a footnote marking two authors who contributed equally.

The etiquette rule is not that one ordering system is correct. The rule is that the order must reflect the team's agreed understanding of contribution, and it must be settled before drafting begins, not renegotiated at submission time.

The corresponding author

The corresponding author is the single point of contact for the journal. This person submits the manuscript, responds to reviewers, handles page proofs, and signs copyright or license agreements on behalf of the team. Etiquette requires that the corresponding author keep co-authors informed at each step. Silent submission, where the team learns their paper was accepted from an automated email, is a well-known breach of trust.

Setting Expectations Before Drafting Begins

The definitive guide to co-authoring etiquette can be reduced to one document: the authorship agreement. It does not need to be formal or long. A short email at the project's start, sent to all contributors, prevents the majority of disputes.

A workable agreement covers:

The author list and order. Names, positions, and the contribution each person is expected to make.
Section ownership. For example, one person drafts the methods, another the introduction, and the first author assembles and harmonizes everything.
Deadlines. Real dates, not "sometime next month."
The target journal. Deciding early shapes formatting, word limits, and scope.
The response plan. What happens if someone misses a deadline, and what happens if the data change the story.
Data and figure ownership. Who can reuse which datasets, figures, and analyses in later papers.

Writing the agreement down is not an accusation of bad faith. Framing it as "let's make sure everyone gets proper credit" makes it easy to send. Teams that skip this step often find themselves renegotiating the author list the week before submission, which is the single most stressful moment to have that conversation.

Rubric-based approaches can help here too. In one pharmacology course, students were asked to build a rubric defining what good scholarly writing looks like and to assign weights to each element before being graded, which increased engagement and made expectations explicit [5]. The same logic applies to co-authoring. A team that writes down its own definition of "done" for each section argues far less than a team that keeps its standards in everyone's head.

Dividing the Writing Work Fairly

Once the agreement exists, the etiquette of day-to-day drafting takes over.

Match sections to strengths

Fair does not mean equal. If one co-author is a strong statistician and a weak stylist, it is reasonable for them to own the results section and the statistical methods while someone else drafts the introduction and discussion. What fairness requires is that the workload is agreed on in advance and that each person's contribution is genuinely substantial enough to justify authorship.

The common weak points are predictable. Students and first-time authors most often struggle with introductions, methods, and the results and discussion sections, with surveys showing more than half of respondents struggling in those three areas [2]. If your team includes a first-time writer, etiquette suggests assigning them a section within their comfort zone first, or pairing them with an experienced writer for review, rather than letting them sink with the discussion section.

Version control and shared drafting

Circulating a single Word file by email with names like "manuscript_final_v7_REAL_final.docx" is an etiquette failure everyone recognizes. Shared documents with tracked changes and comment threads are the accepted norm. Every co-author can see who changed what, and no one's edits get overwritten silently.

A useful habit: one person, usually the first author, holds "edit authority." Others work in suggestion mode or in comments. This prevents two people from rewriting the same paragraph in opposite directions on the same night.

Reviewing each other's sections

When a co-author sends you a draft section, respond within an agreed window, even if only to say when you will respond. Silent co-authors are the most frequent complaint in multi-author projects. When you do comment, distinguish between three kinds of feedback: changes that are required for scientific accuracy, changes that are strongly recommended for clarity, and changes that are matters of taste. Labeling your comments this way keeps a junior co-author from feeling steamrolled by a senior colleague's stylistic preferences.

Communication and Research Collaboration Tools

The tools a team uses shape its etiquette. Collaborative writing platforms make good behavior easier by making contributions visible.

Several categories of research collaboration tools are now standard in scientific collaboration:

Shared documents and comment systems for drafting with tracked changes.
Reference managers that let the whole team share one library so no one discovers at proof stage that half the citations are missing.
Messaging channels and video calls for quick decisions that would otherwise wait for the next meeting.
Project boards that track which section belongs to whom and which deadline is next.

Online mentoring models show how this works in practice. An online research clinic approach for scientific writing used website, email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Google Classroom, webinars, and Zoom to connect tutors and students, combining scheduled video sessions with asynchronous messaging so help was available flexibly at all times [6]. The same mixed-mode structure works for co-author teams spread across time zones: synchronous calls for decisions, asynchronous channels for drafts and comments.

Specialized platforms push this further. Adessowiki, a collaborative wiki environment for scientific programming and document writing, hosts documentation, code, and live execution results together on a central server, so that a paper's computational results can be verified and reproduced by any co-author directly in the environment [7]. Teams doing computational work increasingly expect this standard: the analysis code lives somewhere all authors can run it, not on one person's laptop.

One communication rule outranks tool choice: decisions get recorded. A decision made on a video call and never written down will be remembered differently by three different co-authors. A one-line summary message after each call, such as "Agreed: target journal is X, submission draft due June 15, Ana owns the methods," is cheap insurance.

Etiquette During Peer Review

Co-authoring etiquette does not end at submission. The revision period is when teams are most stressed and when good manners matter most.

Sharing reviewer comments

When reviews arrive, the corresponding author should share them with all co-authors promptly, along with a proposed plan for the response. Reviewer comments can be blunt, and a junior co-author reading a harsh review alone can take it badly. Framing matters. The corresponding author's etiquette job is to translate "this is poorly motivated" into "Reviewer 2 wants a stronger rationale, let's add a paragraph on X."

The value of peer review is well documented. An analysis of nearly 5,000 accepted publications examined how the peer-review process shaped final manuscripts, cataloging the modifications authors made in response to reviewer feedback and how the process affected each paper's contribution [8]. Revisions are not an insult. They are the mechanism by which the paper improves.

Open review changes the etiquette

Some venues now publish reviews openly, alongside reviewer names or full review histories. A study using open review data found that reviewers who chose to reveal their names showed more positive sentiment in their reviews, which the authors interpreted as possibly reflecting social pressure from name association [8]. If you are reviewing as part of a collaboration, or reviewing a rival lab's paper while co-authoring your own, remember that your review may be public. Review the science, not the people.

Community-run review models

Newer models are also changing norms around transparency. Peer Community In is a free process in which researchers voluntarily evaluate and recommend unpublished articles deposited in open archives, publishing the reviews, editorial decisions, author responses, and recommendations openly on the community website [9]. As open, documented review becomes more common, the etiquette expectation shifts accordingly. Assume your review exchanges could be read by your co-authors, your rivals, and your future employers.

AI Tools and Co-Authoring Etiquette

Large language models have added a new etiquette question to every writing team: is AI use allowed, and does it affect authorship?

On authorship, the discussion is active and unsettled. Editors have debated whether an artificial intelligence application can be an author of an academic article, and even posed the question directly to ChatGPT, publishing its answers about being added as an author, about being added without consent of principle, and about being excluded [10]. The emerging practical norm is that AI systems cannot take responsibility for a work, and responsibility is the core of authorship, so AI tools are treated as aids rather than authors.

Using AI writing support during co-authoring raises its own etiquette points:

Disclose meaningful AI assistance. Many journals now require a statement of how AI tools were used. The team should agree on the wording together, because it attaches to everyone's name.
Verify everything. AI-generated text can misstate your own results. If a co-author pastes in an AI draft, every number and claim in it must be checked against the actual data before it counts as team content.
Do not let AI do the peer review thinking for you. A prototype system called MetaWriter, trained on open peer review data to help meta-reviewers draft reviews faster, measurably sped up authoring and improved coverage, but study participants still raised concerns about trust, over-reliance, and loss of agency in their own decisions [11]. The lesson generalizes. AI can draft, but a co-author must own the judgment behind every paragraph.

Co-Authoring Etiquette Scientific Papers Examples

Concrete examples make the rules easier to apply. The scenarios below show the etiquette move in each case.

Example 1: The late addition. A collaborator's technician ran a key assay in month two and is now suggested as an author the week before submission. Etiquette response: check whether the technician's contribution meets the authorship standard. Running an assay can qualify if it was substantial to the result. If it qualifies, add the name and adjust the author contributions statement. The mistake to avoid is adding someone as a courtesy without any contribution, or leaving a genuine contributor off because the list "is already long."

Example 2: The unresponsive co-author. A middle author has not returned the introduction draft in six weeks and has stopped replying. Etiquette response: a direct, private, non-accusatory message. "The submission deadline is March 1. Can you commit to returning the introduction by Friday, or should I take it over?" If silence continues, the team agrees, documented in writing, that the first author will complete the section, and the unresponsive co-author's authorship is renegotiated based on actual contribution.

Example 3: The author order dispute. Two postdocs both feel they did the most work. Etiquette response: return to the original agreement. If no agreement exists, map contributions to the journal's author contribution statement honestly and see what it implies. Where contributions are genuinely inseparable, use an equal-contribution footnote and move on. Do not relitigate the order at submission after the paper is drafted, when everyone's memory of who did what has already hardened.

Example 4: The senior author request. A lab head who contributed funding and space but no intellectual input asks to be included. Etiquette response: the first author, ideally with the mentor's own senior colleagues if needed, explains the authorship criteria and offers generous acknowledgment instead. This conversation is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it should have been held at the project's start rather than at submission.

Situation	What etiquette expects	What to avoid
Assembling the author list	Discuss names, order, and criteria at the project start, in writing	Adding names at submission as a favor or to avoid conflict
Assigning sections	Match sections to strengths, agree on deadlines for each	Assigning the hardest section to the least experienced writer without support
Sharing drafts	Use shared documents with tracked changes and one edit authority	Circulating competing file versions by email
Responding to co-authors	Reply within an agreed window, even briefly	Going silent for weeks on a requested review
Handling reviewer comments	Share all reviews promptly and propose a response plan	A corresponding author revising alone and presenting a finished response
Using AI tools	Disclose use, verify every claim, agree on the statement as a team	Letting generated text enter the manuscript unchecked
Declining authorship	Say so early, offer a concrete reason, and suggest acknowledgment	Accepting the invitation and then doing nothing

Common Mistakes and Limitations

These are the errors that most often damage co-author relationships, along with honest limits of what etiquette alone can fix.

Assuming shared understanding. The most frequent mistake is believing everyone on the team interprets "author" and "fair contribution" identically. They usually do not until you make it explicit.
Conflating effort with contribution. Weeks of work on a task the paper ultimately does not use do not create authorship. Conversely, one decisive experiment can. Discuss contributions in terms of what the paper rests on.
Avoiding hard conversations. Softening a message until it no longer communicates anything ("no rush whenever you get a chance" about a binding deadline) creates larger conflicts later. Direct and kind beats vague and polite.
Letting seniority decide everything. Deference to senior authors is normal and often appropriate, but it does not override honest authorship criteria. Gift authorship benefits nobody's reputation in the long run.
Treating etiquette as a substitute for competence. Good manners cannot rescue a manuscript with a weak design or an unsupported claim. Training programs that measurably improved writing skills did so through sustained, hands-on mentoring rather than one-off advice, and they still flagged plagiarism understanding and publication confidence as areas needing continued work [1]. If your team lacks a skill, invest in learning it.
Overloading the least experienced writer. A first-time author given the discussion section without support is set up to fail. First-time writers benefit from structured approaches. Group investigation methods, in which students research and write collectively, raised average writing scores from 69.45 before intervention to 78.22 after two cycles in one classroom study [12], and needs analyses of writing courses point toward project-based and blended structures as effective supports [13]. Pair, do not dump.

One honest limitation: etiquette cannot resolve every dispute. If a co-author refuses any fair resolution, journals have procedures for authorship disputes, and your institution may have an ombudsperson or research integrity office. Knowing when to escalate is itself part of good practice. Individual disputes need judgment about people and context that no general guide can supply.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is co-authoring etiquette for scientific papers?

It is the set of norms governing credit, workload, and communication among people writing a paper together. It covers who qualifies as an author, how author order is decided, how sections are divided, and how the team communicates through submission and revision.

Who decides the author order?

The team decides together, ideally at the project's start and in writing. In most life science fields, first author did the largest share of the work and last author supervised, but the overriding rule is that the order must honestly reflect agreed contributions.

Can someone be a co-author if they only edited the language?

Language editing alone usually does not meet the full standard for authorship, which requires substantial intellectual contribution, involvement in drafting or revision, final approval, and accountability. Substantial language editors are typically thanked in the acknowledgments section, though professional medical writers have disclosure norms of their own.

What should I do if a co-author stops responding?

Send a direct, private message with a specific deadline and a fallback plan, such as taking over their section. If silence continues, document the situation, complete the work, and renegotiate their authorship based on actual contribution before submission.

Should I include my supervisor if they did not write anything?

No. Authorship requires substantial contribution to the research or the manuscript, not just funding, lab space, or seniority. Supervisors who guided the design and interpretation qualify. Those who only provided resources should be acknowledged instead.

Is it okay to use AI tools when co-writing a paper?

Yes, within the target journal's policies, and with team agreement. Disclose the use as the journal requires, verify every claim and number against your actual data, and treat AI output as a draft that a responsible human author must own and check.

How do we handle a disagreement about authorship before submission?

Return to the written agreement made at the project start and map contributions against it. If no agreement exists, build an honest author contributions statement together and let it settle the list. If the dispute persists, ask a neutral senior colleague or your institution's ombudsperson to mediate.

What is the polite way to decline or remove a co-author?

Decline early and directly, thanking them and offering a concrete reason, then suggest acknowledgment if their contribution was real. Removing someone after they contributed is serious and requires documenting that the contribution does not meet authorship criteria, ideally with institutional guidance.