Authorship on journal articles is an extremely important mark of distinction in science. A person's list of publications is the primary means by which we assess that person's contributions to science. Could you be listed as an author on one of our lab's journal articles? This can and does happen for undergrad RAs in our lab, but it is rare. The reason is that the criteria our lab uses to determine authorship are quite strict. And it is important that we have strict criteria because authorship is such an important symbol of contribution to science.
When determining authorship, the primary question we ask is this: Did the student make "a substantial intellectual contribution" to the journal article? In other words, would the article have been much different if a different student had contributed to the project? For example, collecting the data for a study is not usually sufficient, because the study probably would have turned out the same way if some other student had collected the data. Analyzing the data is not usually sufficient, but it might be sufficient if the student went beyond "following instructions" and suggested new analyses that led to important findings that would otherwise have been missed. Writing an honors thesis by itself is not sufficient, but it might be sufficient if the student developed new ideas that had a significant impact on the journal article.
In our field, order of authorship on a journal article is used to indicate the amount of contribution. The head of the lab is typically last in the author list (the "senior author"). The first author is typically a graduate student or postdoc who was the primary leader of the project and played a major role in conceptualizing the design or analysis. It is extremely rare for an undergraduate RA to be first author on a journal article, even if the article is based on the student's senior project/thesis. This is because very few undergraduates have enough background to take the lead role in conceptualizing the design or analysis. However, it can happen. Here's an example of a paper in which the first author was an undergrad:
He, T., Kiat, J. E., Boudewyn, M. A., Segae, K., & Luck, S. J. (2022). Neural Correlates of Word Representation Vectors in Natural Language Processing Models: Evidence from Representational Similarity Analysis of Event-Related Brain Potentials. Psychophysiology, 50, e13976. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13976