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In Medicine and in Surgery, the convention is similar to that of the Physical Sciences with the most significant contributor being first or last, or with the owner of the lab equipment or funding getting senior author position as the last author.

However, there is a curve ball in Medical and Surgical Journals in that the first three authors are the ones who gain the most credit. The reason for this is that back in the pre-WWW-historic era, when I wrote papers that went into Surgical journals and when I went through medical school and surgical residency, the medical journal articles were all indexed in the Index Medicus.

The Index Medicus was a hard-copy index prepared at the end of each year and found in every medical library with three sets of listings sorted by Medical E-something Subject Headings (MeSH), title of the journal article, and the last name of the first three authors. This paper index was how people found journal articles of interest and how the authors gained "publication cred." I ended up as third author on many papers giving me a lot of cred even above some grad students and post-docs who helped with experiments but had not supervised or designed (or originally proposed some of) the experiments in these papers.

Apurva
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