[idealmedtech]

When you get a certain level of academic inertia (tons of postdocs under you etc), you get author credit even when you don't actively participate in the research or writing itself. What's more interesting is how many first author papers are published per year, per author. First author is typically reserved for someone who did a significant amount of the work on the paper.

[rjmunro]

But sometimes it is reserved for the person whose name happens to come first in the alphabet:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/29/al...

[jonnycomputer]

But determining first authorship itself is non-trivial, as different fields and different journals have different conventions and norms.

[idealmedtech]

Yep, not to mention many groups will list new members higher up so they get cred faster