Abstract: The sequence of authorship in academic papers provides important information for the study of their academic contributions. It is a significant research topic in the field of science of science to determine the important author of the article according to the author’s signature positions, such as the chaperone effect proposed in recent years. The paper analyzes the differences among authors in different positions, defines the first author, second author, third author, last author, corresponding author and penultimate author in different signature positions as the important authors of the article to detect the chaperone effect systematically. The results show the generalized chaperone effect. At the same time, the paper analyzes the change trend and the differences of the chaperone effect of authors in different positions. We explain the differences by calculating the similarity coefficient among authors in different positions and corresponding authors. When there is a high coincidence among authors in different signature positions and corresponding authors, such as the coincidence between the last authors and corresponding authors in comprehensive journals is higher, the coincidence between the first authors and corresponding authors in comprehensive journals is higher. This study can help us to understand the role and the contribution of authors in academic articles, and further develop new scientific theories based on author’s signature positions.