Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Co-Authoring Published Papers as a Graduate Student?

Brian Leiter

A graduate student writes:

For a philosophy graduate student, what proportion (e.g. n%), of the credit for having a published paper does one receive if that paper is co-authored?  I presume this will vary depending on circumstances, so answers for each of these four possibilities would be very useful:

1. Student is first author, co-authored with someone more senior
2. Student is second author, co-authored with someone more senior
3. Student is first author, co-authored with another grad student
4. Student is second author, co-authored with another grad student

Thoughts from readers?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

17 responses to “Co-Authoring Published Papers as a Graduate Student?”

  1. Tim O'Keefe

    If the co-author is somebody more senior, one thing that would usually be helpful is to have the senior co-author write one of your letters of reference, and for that person to discuss explicitly and in some detail the scope of your contribution and how the process of collaboration went.

    Reply
  2. N Williams

    In my experience, co-authored papers in philosophy have the authors listed alphabetically, so options 1 and 2 are the same, as are 3 and 4. I certainly hope that readers aren't treating this alphabetical ordering as indicative of first and second (and third…) authorship!

    Reply
  3. Bill Rapaport

    An old issue of either the Journal of Irreproducible Results or the Annals of Improbable Research suggested that if you were the nth co-author of a paper, you got 1/2^n credit 🙂

    On a more serious note, Tim O'Keefe's suggestion is quite important; a former colleague of mine was denied tenure (in a computer science department!) because all of his papers were co-authored and there was no documentation to indicate what his "real" contributions were.

    Reply
  4. Eddy Nahmias

    I think we should make it standard policy in philosophy to include a footnote that explains the relative contributions of each author, and I typically try to do this in my pieces (though sometimes I have failed to include such a note, on the assumption that without one, people would understand that authorship is equal). Even if authorship is equal, however, and whether or not authors are listed alphabetically, that should be made explicit in a note, if nothing else so that the relevant higher-ups have evidence of contributions, but also so that grad student co-authors are not assumed to be secondary authors unless they actually are.

    These notes can say things such as:
    "Authorship is equal."
    "First author is primary author; authorship is equal among the other authors."
    "Relative contributions of authorship are indicated by order of authors."
    or even more detailed notes such as:
    "First author is primary author of sections 1 and 4, while second author is primary author of sections 2 and 3."
    "First author carried out all empirical studies and statistical analyses; authorship of other aspects of the paper are equal."

    I can see no down side of including such notes and many advantages.

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Ichikawa

    Author order conventions seem to vary a bit. I've co-authored a few papers, and in each case, authors have always been listed alphabetically. But I know that sometimes, order is meant to reflect importance, as in the sciences. (I can even think of a handful of cases where the same group of authors has published in various permutations, as in Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001) and Nichols, Weinberg, and Stich (2003).

    I think it's pretty hard to state rules about relative credit/prestige in any kind of generality. The advice about clarification in letters is good.

    Absent evidence to the contrary, if I were to see a paper co-authored by a grad student and somebody senior, I'd default to the assumptions that (a) the student did most of the work, and (b) the senior person played most of the role in getting the paper published. So I'd judge the student more for the content, and less for the achievement of a publication.

    Of course, it also speaks well of a student that somebody well-respected thought it was worth co-authoring with her.

    Reply
  6. Owen Flanagan

    My rule is that if the alphabetical listing technique is used that (if true) a * note on the first page says that authorship is equal. In several cases, with Tom Polger and Eddy Nahmias, we indicated author weight/effort by putting the later in the alphabet name first, so, e.g., Polger and Flanagan.

    The idea that faculty member speak to the issue of contribution is of course a wise one.

    Reply
  7. Edward Song

    Authorship issues are especially frequent and perplexing in medical and scientific research since papers almost always have several authors and often have scores of them, and there are competing authorship conventions in different fields. A growing trend in medical research is to adopt the author/contributor model, where the specific contributions of every author is described in a footnote. Then there is no ambiguity.

    Reply
  8. Jason Brennan

    It seems to me that people tend to give students (and others) credit for co-authored papers in light of what other kinds of work the students have done. So, if a student has a co-authored piece in a good journal and a single-authored piece in an equally good journal, people tend to think, "Well, she must have been a real contributor to that first piece, because we know she can do high level work on her own." On the other hand, if the student only has co-authored pieces, or if only her co-authored pieces are published in high level journals (while her other work is published in lower tier journals), then people tend to think she was not as important a contributor. I'm not saying this is fair, but rather than this is my perception of how philosophers tend to react. In my own case, I co-authored my first book with my former advisor. Once I got my second book contract for a single-authored book, it seemed that people started giving me more credit toward writing the first. Still, my perceptions of all this might be off.

    Reply
  9. Ben Saunders

    I second Eddy Nahmias's suggestion that it's a good idea to make explicit (in a footnote) the division of authorial responsibility, whether or not some other practice (such as name order) is used. It often seems to be a requirement if a co-authored piece is used as a writing sample to state one's contribution, so it seems best to have it there in the paper. I wouldn't have thought this needed to go into exact details though: I'd suggest that authors simply agree a distribution of credit, which could be 50/50 or 33/67, 75/25, etc.

    If this was generally accepted practice, then hopefully search/tenure committees would indeed distribute credit accordingly! Of course, we might get into all kinds of interesting questions about whether it's better to have one sole-authored Phil Review paper or a 25% stake in four Phil Review papers… Co-authored papers are, however, evidence of other useful skills in collaboration and teamwork, so I'd say that they can be a good idea independently of how people will judge the research contribution.

    Reply
  10. Glen Pettigrove

    As the above comments illustrate, different people respond to co-authored pieces in different ways. When I look at a CV and see a co-authored paper in a good venue, I take that to be a credit to each of the co-authors, irrespective of the order of their names. In addition to showing that they are engaging in research of a professional quality, a co-authored piece suggests that they are likely to be a good colleague. They are not just someone who will pull their own weight in the department, but they are likely to be a positive benefit to their colleagues by being someone with whom others find it fruitful to collaborate. Especially as a graduate student, such credit is a good thing to accrue.

    Unlike Saunders and Nahmias, I am glad we do not have a convention of assigning percentages of credit. I think such a practice would be a bit stingy – too worried about who gets credit for which bits. It would also be misleading. If, for example, the assignment were 50/50, that would invite people to count such a paper as equal to half an article. Each project is different, of course, but often writing something with another person is more work than writing something on one's own and it can require more, rather than less, intelligence to pull off than a sole-authored piece. I'm not sure what we are counting when we count lines on a CV, but if research activity, effort, or intelligence are among the things we are counting, then counting a jointly authored paper as being worth half of a sole-authored paper would fail to be an accurate counting mechanism.

    Reply
  11. Eddy Nahmias

    In response to Glen, I did not suggest assigning percentages. Though it may seem logically impossible, I think a paper co-authored by three people who contributed equally probably indicates that each one contributed at least 50% to the paper! Anyone who's co-authored philosophy papers knows that you don't just split it proportionately and work on your part. My suggested notes above are meant to indicate *relative* contribution; for example "Authorship is equal" should be taken to mean each author contributed roughly equal amounts of time, effort, and thought to the project, but that should not be mis-read to mean that each author produced half of a paper.

    So, the relative powers that be (and our community) should not assign credit based on dividing 100% among number of authors. How they assign credit may vary–for instance, my institution basically assigns as much credit for a co-authored publication as a sole-authored publication, unless there are reasons not to (e.g., if my contribution was less significant than the primary author).

    In addition to the footnotes that I think should become common practice, I agree with Tim O'Keefe that letter writers should honestly report (and describe) the contributions of grad students to paper.

    Reply
  12. Ben Saunders

    I agree that it's not entirely clear what the 'credit' we might be dividing is, but I wouldn't think it has much to do with either effort or intelligence. I wouldn't be inclined to count one person's publications for more or less than another's similar publication record because the first is a genius who produced the work easily, while the second struggled.

    I agree that co-authoring a piece may take more effort than sole authoring, but I don't think that the credit should depend (primarily at least) on effort. It shouldn't be forgotten that co-authoring may also have other rewards in itself, but nor should they diminish credit.

    My thought is that if a publication is to count towards something, like tenure or research assessment, then the contribution made by a co-authored piece has to be divided by its co-authors in some fashion. I think that in practice this would have to be zero-sum: if we were to give each of two authors 75% credit then two colleagues who were each about to publish a sole authored piece could get a greater amount of total credit by declaring both co-authored.

    As I mentioned in my first comment though, co-authoring does indeed show qualities, such as collegiality, independent of the research output itself. So, to that extent, the contribution to one's CV may be positive sum.

    Reply
  13. Richard

    Because others have talked about ordering principles in the sciences, perhaps it's worth saying a bit about one convention that is now very common.

    In many labs now (including all of those at my institution), the author listing reflects – imperfectly – both the contribution and the lab hierarchy. For example, a typical author list might be:

    PhD student, post-doc A, post-doc B, [sub-director], director.

    This would indicate that the paper was largely the PhD student's work – perhaps she carried out the testing, did the stats, and wrote the paper. Post-doc A might be a day to day PhD supervisor, working closely with the PhD student at every stage, and post-doc B a colleague who had previously developed a similar experimental paradigm now being refined in the PhD student's study. If her expertise were needed or wanted, a sub-director might also be called in to consult. In that case, her name would appear before the name of the director, who tends to be last except when first author.

    From this listing it's not always possible to tell how much each person was involved in a particular paper. Usually all will be involved at every stage – meeting to consult, plan, and offer comments on drafts. However, in some labs (not mine!), the director's name goes on every paper regardless of contribution; and there may also be cases where a name gets appended because a colleague is thought to have domain over a particular field of research, despite having contributed little to the paper (again, not in my lab!).

    One can usually be certain that the first author did most of the work. However, this is consistent with both her being the brilliant inspiration behind the study; and with her simply running a project that someone else didn't have time to do.

    As others have commented, these principles aren't set in stone; only a guide to a relatively standard practice.

    Reply
  14. Harry B

    Tim O Keefe is right on this. IN fact, as a faculty member, if you have co-authored with a student, you should usually go to some lengths to ensure you write a letter for said student, and indeed explain the contribution (I've only had this issue once, but its going to come up again before too long).

    Reply
  15. Roy T Cook

    I am not exactly sure what to make of this anecdote, but it is clearly relevant. I know of an instance where junior person A, who had co-authored many times with junior person B, was up for a job at University X. During the deliberations it was (successfully) argued that less than half credit should be given to person A for the co-written papers. A very few years later, person B was also up for a job at University X. It was then (successfully) argued that, in deliberating about whether to offer person B the job, it should be assumed that person B got less than half the credit for these very same papers. Perhaps this is a rational, if somewhat 'better safe than sorry', strategy, but it is a little weird. Both also had a number of impressive solo publications.

    On a lighter note: I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned the additional benefit of co-authored papers: improving one's Erdos number!

    Reply
  16. mark lance

    Since the question specifically involves grad students, I assume the issue is mainly concerned with the job market. And in that context, the letter point seems clearly correct. Perhaps for tenure and the like there is a use for strictly quantitative information. But there are many many ways to contribute half the work to a paper: the whole thing is done collectively; half is written by one author, and half by the other; one has the main idea and the other contributes crucial parts of the argument; one contributes the main argument, and another the responses to the literature; etc. (fwiw, I've been involved in most of these forms of collaboration.) I take it that any rational search committee will want the qualitative details. One is not, at that point, primarily counting up output, but assessing philosophical strengths and weaknesses, sorting out potential, trying to get a feel for how a candidate thinks.

    Another dimension of all this that is not mentioned is the pedagogical. One could take the question to indicate that the primary reason to co-author with graduate students is so that they can get publishing credit. (I'm not saying the original gs says this.) But there is another important benefit – simply apprenticing in the publishing process. Many students, even students who are excellent philosophical thinkers and who write excellent course papers, do not really understand what is involved in producing publishable work. By going through that process with them, we engage in a pedagogically important activity that will help them be productive throughout their career.

    Reply
  17. Mark Nelson

    Roy T Cook's mention of the Erdos number brings up a question: does co-authoring a paper with someone quite famous give a student any amount of proximity bonus? My impression is that there is already such an effect when a student has a well-known advisor; being the protege of a big name opens doors. My anecdotal experience is that having co-authored with the big name makes that effect even stronger than merely having them as a supervisor, because it strengthens the perceived protege aspect. It can help name recognition as well, if "Student & Bigname (2010)" becomes a common citation.

    The comments so far don't seem to indicate people think there's such an effect, though, so I could be wrong; people seem worried that it's actually worse to have co-authored a paper than to have solo-authored the same paper, while my (again, anecdotal) impression is that for an unknown student it's actually better to co-author the paper with someone who already has name recognition than to publish the paper solo— unless perhaps the paper is so excellent that it'll make a real splash on its own.

    It may also be that the other comments are mainly talking about explicitly reviewing someone's CV, while the effect I'm thinking of is more relevant to the question of when a CV gets looked at seriously in the first place.

    Reply

Designed with WordPress