Authoring - Taking Credit

Most times you will not conduct research and prepare a paper as the sole contributor, but instead will work with other researchers. In order to appropriately assign credit for the level of each authors' efforts consider the following guidelines:

1. If you are working with a group of coauthors and each has contributed approximately equally to the research, then list names in alphabetical order or some other arbitrary order.
2. If the level of effort from each author is not uniform, then list the authors' names in the order of contribution level. (It is generally assumed by reviewers, readers and those who will review C.V. that the ordering of authors reflects their relative contribution.)
3. Often a "corresponding author" will be noted. This author could be first, second or even later in the author list. This author is the one to whom readers will address comments or requests. It is also the author that will interact with the journal (editors, publishers). If you are a student and are likely to change affiliations and addresses, then you should not be the corresponding author. If you are the advisor and write with your student, then it is often best to serve as the corresponding author as to provide a more permanent point of contact. If a corresponding author is not noted, then it is assumed that the first author serves as the corresponding author (or another interpretation is that all authors can correspond with readers).
4. If you write with someone of "lesser" seniority (one of your students, for example), listing their name prior to yours does not impair the perceived value of your contribution. However, if your name is listed after a colleague of equal or greater stature, the assumption is that your contribution is lesser, except for clearly alphabetic orderings.
5. Affiliations - this is usually clear cut. You state your current affiliation. The issue may become cloudy if you change affiliations during the time period between beginning to write the paper and the final printer's proofs. Usually an author (especially a beginning academic) will want to list her/his new affiliation so as to gain recognition for the new employer. So, if you are studying with your advisor at University of Pittsburgh and then take a faculty position at Auburn University and are publishing work from your dissertation, it would usual for you to list your affiliation as Auburn University and your advisor, also an author, would list the University of Pittsburgh affiliation. Once in a while you will see a paper that makes this explicit with a statement such as "This work was done while the author was with University of Pittsburgh". This type of statement will generally appear as a footnote under the author list.
6. Finally, as a tip, consider that acceptance rates of papers to journals may increase with experienced coauthors. While this is true, it is also true that your own perceived contribution and growth as an independent scholar might be shadowed by association (particularly repeated association) with a famous coauthor, especially an advisor.