&gt; You raise an important question. It is important to detail the actual contribution, since programming may be perceived as purely implementing an idea with no creative input.<p>Beyond creative input, there&#x27;s also the question of liability in case of academic misconduct.  I&#x27;d question if someone acting in a technician role (say a programming professional) would have a full understanding of the manuscript and so could accept authorship; they may also lack the ability to check the findings of the manuscript which is also problematic.<p>&gt; If you successfully take an idea from concept to working software, or if a research project requires complex software to be written, I think it is almost inevitable that the software developer will end up making a creative contribution.<p>I think we need to be careful about how we define creative contribution; there&#x27;s a line to be drawn somewhere in there between a creative contribution for the sake of the software (i.e., speeding up execution time by 4x for a simulation running on a cluster) versus a creative contribution that enables the research (i.e., a novel real-time optimization algorithm for electrostimulation).  The latter certainly warrants authorship, but I don&#x27;t think the former does.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m also a bit suspicious about the justification that you can&#x27;t be listed because aren&#x27;t a &quot;scientist&quot;. Of course, I don&#x27;t know the details, but it seems fishy.<p>Ditto, which is why I asked.  My first thought was that it sounded like scholarly authorship was poorly explained and if so I was hoping to help out with that.