Comments on: Co-authorships in academia

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 02:06:08 +0000

Much ado about more hot air. Huge waste of time, moneys on all of you, and paper. Univ model is archaic and outdated. Ruined the country. Besides, there’s nothing much new under the sun other than some hard science research results. Made at least three attempts to comment thusly, but got deep sixed.

By: Claire

Claire — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 22:43:35 +0000

Coupla comments. My impression is that having some co-authored papers helps for going on the job market, it shows you can work with others (a Good Thing in a colleague) but too many coauthored papers hurt tenure chances (I’m in linguistics, and not tenured, only just off the job market, so this is mostly from observation). Secondly, there’s another category of coauthorship in linguistics, and that’s publications with one’s field consultant(s). This isn’t all that common as far as I can see, for a couple of reasons: . the consultant doesn’t need tenure. . in university systems where brownie points are awarded for publications (which affect funding, in turn) coauthored publications count for less. . there’s a perception that the consultant does less work than the linguist. All my language materials (learners guides, dictionary supplements, text collections) are coauthored with my consultants and the analysis articles/phd etc are single authored. I would feel really bad about being sole author of a text collection where someone else told the story in the first place, someone else helped me transcribe it and a third person helped with translation. That’s a pretty large part of the intellectual component of the work! and having their names on the front is a source of tremendous pride to the consultants who worked on the text collection. Besides, coauthoring language materials with consultants can’t hurt tenure more than doing text collections, etc, in the first place …

By: Richard Zach

Richard Zach — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 21:38:53 +0000

One of the referees on a recent project proposal noted (positively) that I had already collaborated with . It was an application to NSERC (the Canadian equivalent of the NSF), and in the field (logic), co-authorship is common. But even in other fields where co-authorship is not common (say, philosophy), writing a paper with a noted senior colleague will probably more help than hinder. After all, if you’re not any good, why would write a paper with you? This may be less true, however, if is your dissertation supervisor.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 21:09:55 +0000

Giles, there is indeed a bias. One point I forgot to mention is that there’s a study somewhere showing that women in economics are less likely to co-author than men. Because of the bias already noted, this harms their chances of promotion. There was some speculation about the causes which presumably relate to the social dynamics of a lopsidedly male discipline, but I can’t recall more than that.

By: Paranoia?

Paranoia? — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 21:09:17 +0000

If I weren’t dealing with an itsy-bitsy comment box, I would type out a logistic regression equation with estimated coefficients for each of the possible authorship combinations, interaction terms allowing the coefficients to differ by discipline and, of course, a large stochastic term. But I won’t. I will, however, offer an anecdote. I am first author on a paper that has recently been accepted (yay!) at the top journal in my field. The second (and only other) author is a senior colleague. It so happens that my senior colleague’s last name would appear before mine in an alphebetized list, so it’s hard to interpret the order of authorship as an accident of alphabetization. I have written all correspondence with the journal editor about the article. The acknowledgments on the front cover of the paper include the phrase, “direct all correspondence to [me]”. The editor of the journal (a former colleague of mine) knows exactly where I work, and he also knows that my coauthor is in the process of moving across the country. And yet the acceptance letter was addressed solely to my senior colleague. Clerical snafu? Maybe…

By: Giles

Giles — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 19:34:50 +0000

Surely the problem though is that if co authors get 75% credit, then if on average say 1/2 the papers are co authored, in academia there’s 25% more precieved credit than actual output. In other words, in aggregate people on Selection Committees are acting as though there’s more research going on than there actually is. Might this cause an over bias towards published research in academia as a whole?

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 17:40:42 +0000

Whether or not to co-author strikes me as fine-tuned and luxurious strategy contemplation. Projects that can be developed for single author publication are clearly valuable but not to the exclusion of collaborations. A significant body of work is not a matter of numbers. Of course there’s no recipe for tenure, but not having babies and a lateral move around tenure time are advised.

By: Ross

Ross — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:10:42 +0000

An outstanding discussion. I just completed the T&P process last fall (successfully, thank goodness) at my medical school, but my circumstances—as a law/policy scholar in a clinical/bench science world—made the water even muddier, both for me as I came up through the system, and for the T&P committee, who was forced to rely heavily upon my chairman’s letter and my outside letters for guidance on how “well” I did in the publication area. I had a mix of a couple single-authored pieces in law review journals, and co-authored pieces and one treble authored piece in law review journals and peer reviewed policy, ethical and scientific journals, and a co-authored editorial in Science, which they call a “magazine.” As partial guidance, our T&P committee could look to our law school, which requires two or three single-authored major law review publications, with at least one in a school’s primary law review journal. Most law schools frown upon co-authored work in the pre-tenure period, and importance of journal rank varies from institution to institution. In the medical field, most everything is co-authored, so it is most important for a young scholar to be high in the list of authors (1st or second, ideally), and, as someone mentioned earlier, the final spot is reserved for senior scholars, the same way “and Jane Seymour” might appear as the last credit for a TV movie. Placement can make a difference at some institutions, but volume goes a long way too. I know of one department chair who said he would not write a letter on behalf of someone going up for tenure if they didn’t have at least 15 publications under their belt. Research dollars are important to the basic scientists, so while my field is not big on research dollars, I was fortunate enough to find a research collaborator with whom to partner as co-Primary Investigators on a grant. Not sure how helpful (if at all) this is for your specific case, Eszter, but there it is.

By: harry

harry — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:48:45 +0000

My godfather is a Nobel prize winner in Medicine (he’s a biochemist). Not to name drop or anything. But I was really struck, when looking at his Nobel file (proudly shown to me by his wife, my godmother) that there were just one, maybe two, sole-authored publications, out of the what seemed like hundreds. I don’t know anyone in the humanities who could do that.

By: Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:21:03 +0000

My background is in experimental physics/electrical engineering. In that field, almost all papers are co-authored, just because of the way things work. Usually, the way it’s done is the person who did most of the actual work (grad student or post-doc) is the first author, with subsequent authors ranked according to their contribution. The exception is the professor/lab head who is put on last. The first author and the professor get full credit for the paper, with everyone else getting partial credit. As others have noted, for tenure decisions the stature of the journal is critical. One article in a top tier journal is worth 3 in obscure ones. For a research university, I’d pretty much agree with eponymous’ rankings above. A pre-requisite is the ability to do solid, respected work. Given that, the most important factor is the ability to bring in money. Then the number of publications. The exception is the rare soul who actually makes a major contribution to a field. Then, the caliber of the work outweighs the number of publications. (ALthough if you do work of such high caliber, it’s usually not hard to get money and lots of publications.)

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:14:23 +0000

i’m surprised at the amount of variation here. in astronomy, most papers have more than one author and the first receives most credit. it is important to publish in the major journals (there is a known hierarchy, but also an understanding that certain nationalities may favor certain more local journals because they have lower costs).

By: schwa

schwa — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 06:36:52 +0000

I have nothing of intelligence to say on tenure generally, since I’m still a lowly grad student, but it’d be very interesting to see a disciplinary census of co-authoring practices. In my discipline (comparative politics) the sole-authored paper seems to be the norm, but sometimes—and rising well above “sometimes” in papers which lay the quant. on thick—you get two authors. Higher numbers than that seem fairly rare. On the other hand, international relations seems to deal much more in multi-author papers.

By: ProfGoose

ProfGoose — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 01:37:18 +0000

There are no doubt departmental and university norms, if not codified norms, at any institution. My experience (as a social scientist with a “hard” science bent) is that the situations are completely idiosyncratic at different institutions/departments. For instance, I have just moved from an institution where co-authorship was frowned upon, but not held begrudgingly against someone in tenure cases, depending on volume. In contrast, here at my new institution, co-authorship is lauded and incentivised. As someone who appreciates the social aspects of co-authorship (bouncing ideas off of others who care about the project primarily. I agree with J. Ellenberg…), I am ecstatic about my new situation and very excited that the department and university are accepting of my way of being. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I publish my co-authored pieces in the top two tiers of journals in my discipline…

By: harry

harry — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 00:53:35 +0000

I sole authored all pre-tenure articles, and that is the standard thing in Philosophy, I think. I also think that in Philosophy each author gets less than 50% credit for a co-authored piece (in people’s minds, at least). This is fine if you are writing something that you simply could not have done, or could not have done as well, alone (as is the case with my own pieces in progress co-authored with another political philosopher) even given the time, and also if you are learning from them (as is also the case), or simply having a good time (also true). However, if you co-author with someone in another discipline you get all the credit (100%) because philosophers simply can’t imagine that a non-philosopher could have contributed anything that was of value. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. Philosophy likes to think of itself as closer to the harder social sciences and the sciences than to the rest of the humanities (journal articles over books, rigour over mush, you know). But the overwhelming tendency to sole authorship is one respect in which it resembles the other humanities more. One last thing. Aim for what are regarded as top-tier journals. Maybe I am particularly self-effacing but I wrote a paper targetted for a very obscure journal pre-tenure, and only sent it to the top-tier journal which took it after a senior colleague laughed at me for what he wrongly took to be my modesty, and all but submitted it on my behalf.

By: Mary Rosh

Mary Rosh — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 00:52:16 +0000

Plagiarist! You stole that idea from sir Cyril Burt! I won’t stand for that kind of criticism—John Lott was one of the best professors I ever had in Graduate School at Sockpuppet University.