Does "corresponding author" carry an implied meaning?

Corresponding authorship is often used to signal the person who is the primary contributor to the work. I've seen this in fields like economics where there is a relatively strong norm of listing authors alphabetically. In these cases, the primary contributor is signaled with the corresponding author designation. I've seen people go so far as to list corresponding authorship on their CVs when they list their papers although I think this is far from the norm.

In fields where authorship is not simply alphabetic, I've seen the corresponding author designation used to flag the second author as a major contributor because, even in cases of so called "dual-first authorship," somebody's name has to come first.

In lots of other fields, it caries little signal value and really is just used to mark the person who is in the best position to answer questions about the work. Of course, the person marked as best able to answer question will, mostly likely, be someone who was involved in a wide variety of the research reported in the paper.

In theoretical computer science, "corresponding author" does not carry any implied meaning related to who is the primary contributor.

The coauthors are listed in alphabetical order. The corresponding author might be, for example, the coauthor who took care of the interaction with the publisher, or a coauthor with a fairly permanent mailing address.

In pre-prints, conference abstracts, etc. we do not usually mention any corresponding author. This is just a piece of information that is required by journal publishers.

There is no prestige related to it. Certainly you will not list this kind of information in your CV.

I am sure it can be used for many meanings. I will provide the ones with which I am familiar:

First, corresponding author means it is the person to contact if you have questions about the research. The reasons for this is what varies.

• The first author(s) are not employed at a university or are students
• The first author has done much of the legwork but someone else (a senior scientist) has provided the original idea, funding etc.
• Someone is specifically responsible for a project in which the work for the publication has been made. There may be legal requirements that a specific person should handle correspondence, for example in a company
• In some fields the most important author is not first, in which case the flag can be used.

Sometimes you will see first authors stating they are corresponding author. This is mostly implied by default in fields where the first authorship means also doing most of the intellectual work.

I am sure there are additional examples which hopefully are added by additional posts.