Author Order in China, Japan, Korea vs West

Author order is not read the same way everywhere. A Western reviewer trained to treat first-author position and corresponding-author status as roughly the same signal of “who led this” can misread a paper from a Chinese, Japanese, or South Korean research group entirely — not because the underlying contributions differ, but because the convention for signaling seniority and responsibility through byline position differs. This guide summarizes what peer-reviewed bibliometric research actually shows about that difference, and where it matters operationally: tenure and promotion review, international collaboration agreements, and reading a CV or paper trail across borders.

This is a companion to CASRAI’s broader guide to authorship order conventions by discipline, which covers the alphabetical-vs-contribution-based split across fields generally. This page narrows in on one specific, well-documented regional pattern within that larger picture: East Asian corresponding-author placement.

The core finding: where the corresponding author sits changes by country, not just by field

A 2025 cross-sectional bibliometric study published in Clinical and Translational Science (Hashimoto et al.) analyzed 63,778 papers published in 2022 across 19 countries in general internal medicine and surgery, restricting the sample to papers with four or more authors and a single named corresponding author. Using hierarchical clustering on corresponding-author position, the study found three distinct country clusters:

Cluster A — corresponding author usually listed last: China, South Korea, and Taiwan. The authors attribute this to Confucian cultural values that emphasize hierarchical relationships and respect for seniority — the lab head or senior principal investigator, who supervised the work and carries ultimate responsibility for it, takes the traditionally senior last-author slot and is also the point of contact for the journal.
Cluster B — corresponding author usually listed second: Japan, along with India, Italy, Turkey, and Spain. For Japan specifically, other bibliometric work has found the rate of second-author-as-corresponding-author is roughly 25 times higher than in the United States — the supervisor, who typically secures funding and serves as the project’s public face, is placed second rather than first or last, a distinct convention from either the Chinese/Korean pattern or the US pattern.
Cluster C — corresponding author usually listed first: the United States, England, and Germany. Here the convention assumes the corresponding author was directly, hands-on involved from the early stages of the work and is both the primary writer and project overseer — the assumption a Western-trained reader typically brings, wrongly, to papers from other conventions.

The practical implication: “who is the corresponding author” and “who did the most work” are not the same question, and the mapping between the two is convention-dependent, not universal. A last-author corresponding-author byline on a paper from a Chinese or Korean lab is not an anomaly or a red flag — it is the modal pattern for that context, and it does not by itself imply the person was uninvolved. Conversely, treating last-author position as automatically low-contribution when evaluating a CV from these countries risks systematically undercrediting senior East Asian researchers by Western reviewers’ own house rules.

Co-first and co-corresponding authorship: markedly more common in Chinese-affiliated publications

A second, independently documented pattern concerns how "equal contribution" is signaled. Bibliometric analysis of PubMed/PMC records from 2010–2024 shows a sharp rise in explicitly tagged co-first authorship across biomedical literature generally — from roughly 19% of tagged articles in 2015 to over 30% by 2024, with some journals exceeding 50%. But the growth is not evenly distributed: China accounts for the largest share of that growth by a wide margin (roughly 41% of fractionalized co-first-author contributions in the dataset, versus roughly 15% for the United States and 5% for Germany), with a roughly 13-fold increase from 2015 to 2024 — substantially faster than other major research-producing countries in the same dataset.

A direct journal-level comparison makes the scale concrete: in 2024, the Chinese Medical Journal published co-first authors in 49.3% of its articles and co-corresponding authors in 38.1%, versus 4.2% and 1.8% respectively for JAMA in the same year. Related bibliometric work on "the emerging phenomenon of multiple corresponding authorship in China" documents the same trend from a different angle: naming more than one corresponding author on a single paper is disproportionately a Chinese-institution practice relative to most other major research-producing countries.

Why this pattern exists is documented as a mix of institutional and structural factors, not a single cultural explanation: China’s biomedical output has grown rapidly and now involves large, multi-institution collaborations more often than earlier decades; many Chinese universities and hospitals tie promotion, bonuses, or degree requirements to first-author or corresponding-author publication credit specifically (rather than any-author credit), which creates direct institutional pressure to formally split that specific credit among more contributors on a single paper; and co-first/co-corresponding designation has become an accepted, editorially sanctioned mechanism (most major biomedical journals now have an explicit policy permitting it, distinct from earlier eras when only single first- and corresponding-author slots existed) for doing so within current publishing norms rather than around them. See CASRAI’s dedicated guide on co-first authorship and equal contribution and the Co-First Authorship dictionary entry for how publishers structure and cite these designations mechanically.

What explains the difference, per the actual research

The literature attributes the pattern to institutional incentive structures at least as much as to broad cultural framing, and the two are difficult to fully separate in the data:

Promotion and credit systems tied to specific author positions. Where a researcher’s institution, funder, or degree program formally counts only first-author or corresponding-author publications toward advancement (a documented practice at many Chinese universities and some Korean institutions), teams have a direct incentive to create more of those specific credited slots on collaborative papers — hence the rise in co-first and co-corresponding designations.
Hierarchical lab structures. The Hashimoto et al. clustering result explicitly attributes the last-author-as-corresponding pattern in China, Korea, and Taiwan to Confucian-influenced hierarchy within the research group: the principal investigator retains the position historically read as senior (last) while also taking on the corresponding-author’s practical/administrative role, rather than the two being split as they more often are in the US pattern.
Scale of collaboration. China’s biomedical research output involves large multi-institution, sometimes multi-national teams more often than a decade ago, and larger teams generically increase the practical need for more than one point of contact — a structural driver independent of any cultural explanation, and one that also partly explains rising co-corresponding rates in other high-output countries, just from a lower base.

None of this is a claim that Chinese, Japanese, or Korean researchers, individually or as a group, are more prone to inflated authorship claims than researchers elsewhere — the honorary/gift/ghost authorship problem documented by COPE and covered in CASRAI’s honorary vs. gift authorship guide is a global one, not a regional one, and none of the studies cited above measure or claim otherwise. What the data does show is a difference in which byline position a given role (senior supervisor, primary contact) conventionally occupies — a labeling-convention difference, not a rigor or integrity difference.

What this means for cross-border collaboration and review

Reading a CV or tenure dossier. A reviewer unfamiliar with these patterns may undercount a senior Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese researcher’s leadership role if they only credit first-author papers, since that researcher’s leadership is more likely to show up in the last-author, corresponding-author slot. Conversely, a Japanese researcher’s leadership role may show up in second position rather than either end of the byline. Institutions running international tenure or hiring committees benefit from asking candidates to clarify role via an explicit statement (a CRediT contributor-roles statement, where the journal supports one) rather than inferring role from position alone.
Setting expectations in new collaborations. Because the last-author/corresponding-author split and the co-first/co-corresponding rate both differ by country, international teams benefit from agreeing on an author-order and credit-statement approach explicitly and early — the same recommendation CASRAI makes generally in its authorship agreement guide, but with added weight when team members come from institutions with materially different formal promotion criteria attached to specific byline positions.
CRediT and contributor-role statements as a cross-walk. A structured, role-based contributor statement (CRediT, now ANSI/NISO Z39.104) does not replace author-order convention — journals still print an ordered byline — but it gives international readers and evaluators a position-independent way to see who did what, which is exactly the gap a byline-position-only reading leaves open across these different conventions. Journals and consortia working across US, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean teams benefit from requiring one alongside, not instead of, the ordered author list.
Don’t assume the ICMJE criteria are applied identically. The ICMJE’s four authorship criteria are formally the same standard cited by journals worldwide, including major Chinese, Japanese, and Korean medical journals — but who satisfies them, and where that person then appears in the byline, is filtered through the local convention described above before it reaches the printed order.

Frequently asked questions

Does a last-author corresponding-author byline mean the same thing in a Chinese paper as a US paper?

Not automatically. In the US-dominant convention, the corresponding author is typically also the first author and is read as the person most directly, hands-on responsible for the work day to day. In the China/Korea/Taiwan-dominant convention documented by Hashimoto et al. (2025), the corresponding author is more often the senior lab head listed last, reflecting overall supervisory responsibility rather than direct hands-on execution — which is closer to the traditional "senior author" role in US biomedical convention, just formally combined with the corresponding-author’s administrative function instead of split from it.

Why does Japan’s pattern differ from China’s and South Korea’s, if all three are described as Confucian-hierarchy-influenced?

The bibliometric clustering found Japan grouped separately (corresponding author most often second), not with China/Korea/Taiwan (corresponding author most often last). The published explanation is that Japan’s research-management conventions place the supervising figure — who secures funding and serves as the study’s institutional face — in second position specifically, a distinct convention from both the Western first-position and the China/Korea/Taiwan last-position patterns, underscoring that "East Asian" is not one uniform convention even where general hierarchical deference is a shared cultural factor.

Is the higher rate of co-first and co-corresponding authorship in China evidence of authorship inflation or misconduct?

The cited studies do not draw that conclusion, and CASRAI is not asserting it here. The documented drivers are institutional (promotion systems that count only first/corresponding-author credit, creating incentive to formally split that specific credit among genuine contributors) and structural (larger multi-institution teams), not a claim about integrity. Genuine ghost, guest, or gift authorship — crediting someone who did not meet authorship criteria, or omitting someone who did — is a distinct, globally documented problem covered by COPE’s guidance, and applies the same way regardless of country.

Should a US or European journal require CRediT statements specifically for submissions from these regions?

CASRAI does not recommend a country-specific policy — CRediT and equivalent structured contributor statements are useful for any multi-author, multi-institution paper regardless of origin, precisely because author-order convention varies enough, even within a single country’s disciplines, that byline position alone is an unreliable read of who-did-what anywhere. The research summarized on this page is a reason to apply that standard consistently and to interpret bylines from any single-order-convention background cautiously, not a reason to single out submissions by country of origin.

Related CASRAI resources

Sources: Hashimoto et al., “Global Trends in the Value of Author Order Across Medical Publications: A Cross-Sectional Bibliometric Study,” Clinical and Translational Science, February 2025 (Wiley); bibliometric analysis of PubMed/PMC equal-contribution tagging, 2010–2024; comparative data on co-first/co-corresponding authorship rates in the Chinese Medical Journal versus JAMA, 2024; published research on multiple corresponding authorship trends in China. This page will be updated if CASRAI identifies more recent or more granular country-level data.