This author is the first name readers will see, and because of various citation rules, publications are usually referred to by the name of the first author only. The “first author” is a coveted position because of its increased visibility.The following are some notable implications regarding author order. In theory, everyone on the list should be credited equally since it takes a team to successfully complete a project however, due to industry customs and other practical limitations, some authors will always be more visible than others. Why does author order matter?Īlthough an author list should only reflect those who have made substantial contributions to a research project and its draft manuscript (see, for example the authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors), we’d be remiss to say that author order doesn’t matter. In this article, we will quickly review common practices for listing authors and why the order matters for you as you develop your academic career. Additionally, what if the authors contribute relatively equal amounts of work? Similarly, if a study was interdisciplinary (and many are these days), how can one individual’s contribution be deemed more significant than another’s? What happens, though, when you have a long list of authors? It would be impractical to rank the authors by their relative contributions. With a handful of authors, a group might be inclined to create an author name list based on the amount of work contributed. The growing list of collaborative research projects raises important questions regarding the author order for research manuscripts and the impact an author list has on readers’ perceptions. In fact, the average original research paper has five authors these days.
Amongst the Tamil writers of that era, those who worked at the radio stations and newspapers or at the Indian Movie News magazine were considered as being privileged as they were paid to write.It’s rare that an article is authored by only one or two people anymore. This passion drove them to self-educate themselves in the art of writing grammatically structured poetry, short stories and novels and become eloquent public speakers. Their asset was their high aspiration to be recognised as a writer. Most of them were unschooled and worked as daily rated labourers, hair-dressers, road laying coolies, port workers, Tamil school teachers and some were even unemployed. Most writers were lowincome earners associated with working-class Tamils. This ideal was rooted in the late colonial period and fully developed in the post-colonial years in Tamil Nadu, Malaya and Singapore. Becoming and being a literati has been the ideal among them.
Tamil literature was left to the latter to be fostered as part of their Tamil language efforts. At the time of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, owing to the colonial past, a cultural gulf existed between English-educated Tamils and predominantly Tamil-using Tamils.