Q: Can a Ph.D. student be a corresponding author?
I'm a Ph.D. student in social science. I am planning to submit a paper to a journal during my Ph.D. course. I tried convergence research with doctoral students in other majors in science. The first author is me, and the second author is another Ph.D. student. There are two authors in total, and both of them are Ph.D. students so, it is difficult to designate a corresponding author (The corresponding author must be designated in the journal submission program).
As a first author, can I be the corresponding author? If look at the definition of a corresponding author, it is the role of mainly communicating with each other with responsibility for the paper, so there seems to be no problem.
Yes, it is possible for a Ph.D. student to be the corresponding author of a paper, provided they were the one who designed the skeleton of the project/study. This is because during correspondence, it is important for the corresponding author to know every single detail of the study. Moreover, it is important for the co-author to provide their consent to this arrangement.
You may have noticed the conventional practice of marking the last author as the corresponding author; however, there is no such written rule. The sequence of the author list, which is based on relative contribution, does not always determine who should be the corresponding author. Therefore, it is acceptable to mark the first author as the corresponding author.
Hope that helps. All the best for your submission!
This content belongs to the Conducting Research Stage