When you research team is about to submit a paper, and there people multiple people involved in the project, and you need to decide the order of the authors on the publication, you may have to say:

I should be the first author.

I wonder if there are better ways to convey with idea. This way of saying is extremely hard to vocalize becasue it is a complex statement that means multiple things:

  1. I do the most amount of work in this project,
  2. my contribution is the most important thing to the completion of this paper,
  3. I am confident and probably not being humble (maybe only inhumble for this occasion, or I am always that self-entitled), and
  4. you (the co-authors) must either leave that position to me or enter an unfriendly conflict with me, and our relationship may be weird afterwards.

The first two are the positive and productive way to think about it, while the last two is negatively self-concious.

BTW, the author ordering thing is unfortunate. Text is linear, so authors’ name also need to be lined in a linear order. Therefore there must be a single first author, even when multiple people contributed equally to the paper. I guess that is not always a problem in industry. There, a team generally has a manager, and multiple workers, each of whom has their own title that can specifically be attributed to for an area of work behind a product. An team behind a paper, on the other hand, usually does not have such titles. So maybe the difference is in how labor is divided in the two contexts. In industry, such a division is contracted, fully respected, and long-term. People are usually willing to stay in one duty and be good at it. On the other hand, in academia, although such a division still exists for practical reasons, they are expectedly ephemeral (because most researchers want to be well-rounded). In fact, reseachers can benefit from achievements showing that they are good at all things research-related (writing, coding, doing math, planning, etc.)