How do you decide the author order in publications?

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First author = did the most work
Last author = oversaw/funded the work
In-between = normally based according to contribution.

My answer applies to peer reviewed journals only as authorship doesn't really make much impact for conference publications.
I don't think there's any set way but this is what I do -
1st author: The person who helmed the research. Played an overall major role in experimental design (if applicable), data collection, analysis, etc.

2nd and 3rd authors: Who did majority of the writing and perhaps helped with the data collection and analysis part.

4th Author onwards: Anyone involved with the research and/or paper in some capacity (e.g. proofreading, writing, etc ) but it's not like the paper wouldn't be able to exist without them.

Now this may vary wildly as I've seen papers with 10+ authors (which always kind of boggles my mind) so projects may have more than 1 very important personnel. Usually such projects yield more than one paper, so the 1st authorship is distributed amongst the top/important personnel.
This holds true for papers from PhD dissertations as well in my experience. I wrote 3 papers with my advisor where I was the first author on two and my advisor was on 1.
Hope this helped even if a little bit!

Wow I had no idea how much thought went into something as small as the author order

Usually just goes from the most crucial person involved to the one who contributed the least

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