Lessons from a long road to a first-author paper

"As a fifth-year PhD candidate, I have a degree in not getting enough sleep and an unhealthy habit of scrolling through LinkedIn. My feed is a relentless highlight of everyone else's successes: papers, major grants, coveted fellowships. And then there's me, in a five-year-long, committed relationship with a massive project, in the field of neuroscience. It's not that I haven't published anything. My name appears on co-authored papers that I'm proud of, collaborations in which I contributed data, analyses and expertise."

"This choice meant a longer road to first authorship compared with some of my peers, who were finishing projects and seeing their work published sooner. However, graduate students know that there's a different gravity to first authorship. Co-authorship says You were part of the story', but first authorship says This was your story to tell'. It's treated like the holy grail of the PhD journey, the golden ticket to a good postdoc, the milestone of independence and, in many programmes, the key to graduating."

A five-year neuroscience PhD project expanded from a simple question about how a receptor regulates learning-circuit flexibility into a technique-intensive, large-scale program. The work demanded new methods and complex analyses and produced unexpected results that generated further questions and experiments. The project was structured as a single comprehensive story rather than as incremental publishable segments, which lengthened the path to first authorship. Co-authored papers reflected collaborative contributions, but first authorship carries distinct career weight as proof of independence and often influences postdoc prospects and graduation. In a mid-sized lab, a high-impact first-author paper becomes a career-defining milestone.

Read at www.nature.com