>>11843160In biomedical research, it's the PI who is last author. Exceptions are when the PI starts his or her lab and are physically in the lab doing experiments, then they may put themselves as first author and corresponding author. The grad student or post-doc who does the experiments, writes the manuscript (or at least a draft of it), etc., is first. Authors are arranged in order of contributions, that's at discretion of corresponding authors. I've been on papers with 10+, 20+ authors, not uncommon in drug discovery in industry or in academia-industry collaborations. I've found that in academia, people really only care if you're first, maybe second, third is pushing it. When I was snooping around for industry postdocs at big pharma shops, I found that they were receptive and even impressed to the so-called "n-th authorship" that's dreaded in academia, provided that you could explain what specifically you did. So that was nice. Still went academia for postdoc, though.
