What earns authorship
Authorship follows substantial intellectual contribution — designing part of the study, doing analysis that shaped the conclusions, writing sections, interpreting results. Running samples or entering data alone is usually acknowledged, not authored. The lines vary by field; your mentor knows the norm. Have the conversation about who will be an author before a draft is circulated, not after.
Author order
In most technical and science fields, first author did the most and often wrote the draft; the last author is frequently the senior/PI; middle authors contributed meaningfully in between. In some fields order is alphabetical. As an undergraduate you are more often a middle author on your first paper and sometimes first author on a project you led — either is a strong line.
Your likely role
Commonly: a defined piece of the analysis or the experiments, a methods or results subsection to draft, making figures, running down references, and responding to specific reviewer comments in your area. Do your piece well and on time; a reliable junior author gets invited onto the next one.
The process, briefly
Draft → internal revision cycles with co-authors → submission to a journal → peer review (weeks to months) → revise-and-resubmit (usual) → acceptance → proofs → publication. It is slow. Your name is on it the whole way, so keep engaging with the revisions even after you have graduated or moved on.
Integrity and data
Everything you contribute has to be real and reproducible — do not round toward the hypothesis, do not reuse a figure without saying so, cite sources for anything not your own. If you have a concern about how data is being presented, raise it with your mentor; if that does not resolve it, the research-integrity office gives confidential guidance.
Getting the benefit
A publication is often the single strongest item on a graduate-school or research-job application. Keep a copy, list it correctly on your CV (full citation, your author position), be able to explain your specific contribution in an interview, and use "cited by" over the next years to see where the work went.
Fictional information
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