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A reader writes with a useful question:
What are the criteria for co-authorship in philosophy? What level of contribution to a philosophy paper merits being named co-author,and what level of contribution do you assume named authors on philosophical papers to have made?
I've done a decent bit of co-authorship, sometimes with philosophers and sometimes with scientists. I don't think there's a clear standard in the discipline, but we've usually been able to work it out by relying on the standards of other disciplines. First, I should say that almost always the "contributing author" standard is one that has to be amenable to all authors on the project. It's important to agree with your authors early and beforehand what the authorship ordering will be. It will help before the paper begins to assign a "lead author" who can then see the project through. That person should get first authorship.
Here are three basic categories of papers that I've been writing and the standards that I've been using:
Co-authorship with other philosophers: in these cases, authorship tends to be evenly distributed between both or all parties. For first author, we've been using as a standard both (a) the person with the main idea behind the paper and (b) the person who puts the most amount of work into making the paper come into existence. Usually this is the same person, so it's not a problem.
Co-authorship with scientists: in these cases, we've been assigning authorship according to two criteria, both (a) regarding the upshot of the article (whether more philosophical or more scientific), and (b) according to the person who puts in the most work, usually the lead author.
Co-authorship with grad students: these cases can be trickier because, at least in my experience, advisors typically put an enormous amount of work into assisting with the paper. In fact, writing with grad students can be quite a bit harder and more time-consuming than co-authoring with established authors. I've been doing a fair bit of this sort of authorship recently, and we've been assigning "lead authors" to assist in coordinating and completing the paper. Even though these authors are lead, and this thereby shifts the ordering of authorship, I as advisor have ended up doing _a lot_ of work, maybe even more than the lead authors. I'm somewhat at a peace with this, but I have to say, it's a sacrifice and an enormous time suck. The upside to these sorts of papers is that they have a pedagogical dimension, so rewards come in other ways.
Having said all this, co-authorship is really a great way to go and I'd recommend it highly. I've learned a lot from my co-authors and it often makes for some really interesting, hybrid discussions. It may not be for every branch of philosophy, but in my area, it works pretty well.
I think that it's difficult to state precisely the kind of contribution one must provide in order to be a proper co-author. Often, the contribution is one of writing part of the paper. But perhaps, in principle, one needn't write a single word. Suppose Author A writes 30,000 words and Author B simply (like Michaelangelo with the David) whittles the ugly manuscript down to a 7,000 word concise, well-packaged paper (a task, suppose, Author A would have been incapable of doing). This is probably good enough for Author B to qualify as a proper co-author, as the paper's final form is creditable to the collective effort more so than to either individual effort.
On a different matter: I that if A has co-authored a paper with B, it would be a mistake to view the "publication value" here as that of a "half-publication" for A and B. It's perhaps a slightly less, but (much) nearer the value of a single-authored publication (for each). Does anyone see this differently?
Things would be different if the person whom you call 'Author B' was responsible for thinking up some of the main ideas of the paper. But if 'Author B's' contribution is, as you write, 'SIMPLY' that of whittling down a long, unwieldy manuscript into a much shorter, well-packaged paper, then this person is the paper's editor rather than a co-author.
I think the grad student/faculty member case is tricky, as Ben Hale says. Faculty should be helping out with grad student papers – that's part of their job.
Some of the things I wrote as a grad student were so heavily assisted by the faculty at Monash that they could largely have been co-authored papers. But they weren't, and it's probably OK that they weren't, because that kind of help is what faculty do. (Or, at least, that's what faculty of the quality of Monash's do.) If I put as much work into a colleague's paper as some faculty put into my papers, I'd expect a co-authorship credit. If I put that much work into a grad student's paper (or perhaps even an untenured colleague's paper), I'd expect a generous acknowledgement. These kind of distinctions make it hard to write general rules.
Mike, I understand why you would say this. I agree that in most all cases, *merely* editing a paper falls short of the kind of contribution required for proper co-authoring. I think the case I mentioned might be an exception, given the (blatant) inability of Author A to have (on her own) generated a paper resembling the final product.
To what extent, by the way, do you think "thinking up some of the main ideas of the paper" is a sufficient condition for proper co-authorship?
I'd be interested to know what you make of these two cases:
Case 1: A talented but lazy philosopher (A) pontificates a great paper idea over beers at the pub and suggests co-authoring it with someone else (B). B assiduously writes up the paper, developing the idea very carefully and well. B writes nothing, and both names go on the paper. Was A a proper co-author?
Case 2: A thinks up all the ideas, drafts a careful outline for how the paper should go. Author A is busy, though, and asks Author B to co-write it, by simply fleshing out (in accordance with A's explicit instructions) A's ideas, in accordance with the outline. Is B a proper co-author?
* In Case 1: I meant, "A writes nothing"
We philosophers on medical faculties co-author much (most, in my case) of our publications for the peer-reviewed literature. There are well understood criteria that must be met. The Journal of the American Medical Association authorship form is one of the best representations of those requirements.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/data/ifora-forms/jama/auinst_crit.pdf
Larry McCullough
This is a good question, but I doubt that there are any useful criteria to be had here. Like Brian Weatherson, I think that there is sometimes very little (if any) difference between a named co-author and a person generously acknowledged in a footnote. I've co-authored quite a bit, both with my PhD supervisor (during grad school and after receiving my PhD) and with other colleagues, and in each case the process has been so organic that I think it would be wrongheaded to try to determine "whose idea was whose", or anything like that. I think it's up to the authors what counts as a "sufficient" contribution for co-authorship, and for those of us not privy to the countless discussions and revisions that no doubt went into producing a co-authored paper, our best bet is to make the following assumptions: (1) if the names are in alphabetical order and there is no note indicating a difference in how much each author contributed, then we should assume that authorship was equal (which, in my view, is not to say that each author only did 50% of the work, but rather that both did 100% — co-authorship is not "easier" than authoring a paper alone), and (2) if the names are out of alphabetical order and there is no note indicating how much each author contributed, then the author whose name appears first did the bulk of the work.
(The important question for me (being two years away from tenure) is how co-authored publications ought to be evaluated for the purposes of tenure and promotion. I get the sense that co-authored pieces are treated with more skepticism than they ought to be, but then again I know a lot of people in this profession who are quite possessive of "their" ideas. I've never quite understood this, and I *hope* that's not just because I am utterly without ideas.)
Per Brian W's comment, I should probably clarify that while of course it's true that assisting grad students with their own singly authored papers also involves a fair bit of time, these particular co-authored projects are mostly projects in which I have a very, very heavy influence. The work is not only supported by a grant, but we sit in a conference room, write up ideas, project them on a screen, and go line-by-line writing the paper. It's arduous, but I think really productive and helpful for the grad students.
As for Neal's question about evaluation for tenure, this is a really critical question. I think it's important to distinguish this in your research dossier, but also some departments make a point of specifying the strengths of co-authorship based on category of authorship. The environmental studies program, in which I am co-rostered, has built into our merit evaluation criteria slightly more credit for co-authored papers with grad students than for co-authored papers with other faculty. This encourages the kind of work I'm talking about. We've only recently written this into the merit evaluation criteria, as many of our junior faculty are adopting this model, but I think it's an important innovation. Honestly, I can't stress this enough, the pedagogical rewards of working on papers with grad students are very high for all parties, even me.
On the other hand, the criteria also give more credit to first authors than to second or third authors. That's a huge problem within the ENVS program, as we have faculty from across the university and standards vary wildly between disciplines. Laurence MacCullough above mentions the criteria for medical scholarship, but these are not at all standard from discipline to discipline. Psychology, I think, puts lead author at the end. Some disciplines put the Grant PI as the first author, even if that author didn't participate heavily in the authorship. In philosophy I think it makes most sense to go alphabetical or to agree beforehand on a first author. Our papers, perhaps more than most other disciplines, are the most likely to have some sort of author contribution parity. Other interdisciplinary papers will have different sections written by different parties. If original empirical research is being presented as a core part of the argument, then that author deserves first authorship.
I don't have firm views about your Cases 1 and 2. With respect to your original case, I don't think it matters that the author couldn't do the editing himself. I recently edited papers of someone who is no longer alive. The fact that he was therefore incapable of doing what I did doesn't make me a co-author. Even if he had never been capable, I don't think that would have made me a co-author.
Mike, okay, that's a pretty compelling point… I hereby back off my earlier claim
Larry's 'well-understood criteria that must be met' are useless for solving any of the interesting or substantive issues that come up in determining the legitimacy of a co-authorship, including the questions people are raising in this thread. JAMA gives four criteria, A through D. C includes the option, "I have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for part of the content." If we knew what 'sufficiently' or 'take responsibility' or 'part of' meant here, we wouldn't be having this thread. D includes options such as "I have made substantial contributions to the intellectual content of the paper as described below: Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content". Again, if we knew the criteria for 'substantial', 'critical', 'important', or 'intellectual content', this would all be easy. As far as I can tell the JAMA requirements and other similar new medical journal requirements have erased serious questions in social epistemology and ethics about authorship and responsibility by substituting institutional procedures that serve as proxies for them and don't address the real issues at all. (I'm actually doing a bunch of work on exactly this issue right now, a lot of it with Bryce Huebner.)
I'd say 'yes' to both cases.
Neal, It seems to me that there is a simple solution when it comes to tenure, promotions and similar situations. The paper is a joint effort, so in one way it does not count for as much as single-authored publication. But how much does it count for? That's for you to decide in consultation with your coauthors. If you put in 50% of the work and the ideas and if your coauthors agree with you about the relative weight of your contribution, then you simply add a note to that effect on the relevant form. That gives you 50% of whatever kudos it receives. (Thus 50% of a good and much-cited paper should give you more glory than 100% of a paper that hasn't made such a splash.) However it is important to be in agreement with your coauthors here especially if they are likely to be submitting the similar forms to the same committees. Thus Colin Cheyne and I had a joint paper published during the the last assessment period for the PBRF (the New Zealand equivalent of British REF). Our 'evidence portfolios' were going to be inspected by the same people. It was therefore important that we were in agreement about the relative weights of our respective contributions since otherwise the committee would have concluded that one of us at least was a liar and a braggart. But if you can't reach agreement about such things with your coauthors then you probably should not be writing papers with them in the first place.
There's no fixed number or formula for determining what a co-authored piece ought to count for across contexts.
(I think this is less a response to the original question than a response to some of the answers to it. I'm addressing some of the comments about how co-authored pieces might count in subsequent assessment.)
I think the use of coauthored papers in assessing tenure has to be hived off from other uses. Tenure is a global judgement, not about a person's past work, but about how they'll continue to contribute. Coauthoring a good paper where there are other single author papers of similar quality is more evidence that one will continue to contribute over time, perhaps even in a different collaborative way from the way the single author papers display. Writing *only* coauthored papers is something that less clearly presents evidence of continued contribution. The mixture seems to me greater than the sum of its parts in this context. I guess that's partly because being able to write a good paper on one's own is evidence that one is contributing more than just stenography to a joint project. So in that context, either as a colleague passing on a colleague's internal case, or as an outside reviewer evaluating a tenure case, it might make sense to count a co-authored piece as just as weighty (or nearly as weighty) as a single-author piece. It gives evidence that each co-author is going to contribute in useful ways in the future.
For things like "merit" raises it would be crazy to count a co-authored paper as having the same weight at single authored papers. (My actual view is that there should be no algorithm for even single authored works, so what I say here is not really meant to support any fixed ratio.) For many years, I had two colleagues who wrote everything together. Had their papers each been given just as much weight as those written by any individual colleague they would have together contributed exactly as many papers as a single person writing just as many papers. Yet they would together have received double the rewards. (And everyone else including those who individually contributed as much as they did would receive a lesser share of the fixed pool of salary resources.) Something would be wrong with that.
But then, as I said, I don't like algorithms for this sort of thing.
I'm puzzled by Ben Hale's claim that "[i]f original empirical research is being presented as a core part of the argument, then that author deserves first authorship". Why would empirical research always trump conceptual research? Suppose C has a novel, beautiful, and super heavyweight argument for an important philosophical claim, but recognizes that the argument rests on an unsurprising empirical claim. C is ill-prepared to conduct the empirical research needed to provide evidence for the unsurprising empirical claim, but D is prepared. So D does conduct the original research. The necessary research, however, is of the sort that pretty much any first-semester graduate student in the relevant empirical discipline could do. It's very light weight. Nevertheless, C's argument rests on the claim, so the "original empirical research is … a core part of the argument". I don't see why D ought to get first authorship, given that C did the heavy conceptual lifting and D did some pretty routine stuff.
One thing that I've noticed is that institutions vary widely in their practices about how much much "academic credit" people receive for being co-authors. I've co-authored papers with someone whose university required him to state, in his promotion materials, what % of the work on each paper was his. My university doesn't ask, and I was told explicitly at one point that I would receive "full credit" for co-authored papers. Still, since I had already determined what percentage of our co-authored papers I was responsible for, I went ahead and submitted this information in my own promotion materials. At no stage in the process, from the department committee to the provost, did anyone even mention this: when they said that "Miller has published X journal articles," the co-authored papers were always counted just as if I was the sole author. I have no idea how cases from sciences are handled, where papers might have many co-authors, but at the higher level of review I would have scientists looking at my file and the co-authorship was still ignored. I can't really defend or explain my university's practice here, but it certainly makes a difference to the advice that I'd give junior faculty about whether to co-author.
For co-authors coming up for tenure or "the market": it is often a good idea to get co-authors to write up a short note for your file detailing your contributions, at least when your co-authors are senior (and not lunatic megalomaniacs). This way, concerns about contributions can be nipped in the bud (it is also a way to get some extra kind words in the file). Different institutions may have different practices regarding what is possible here; candidates should confer with their chair (and other friendly senior faculty) early on in the process.
People writing "official" letters for the placement and promotion of co-authors should in most cases address the issue of relative contributions, keeping firmly in mind that the letter is a venue for extolling the candidate's strong points, not their own.
Re Ben's comment on authorial order in Psychology (perhaps the outside discipline where philosophers are most likely to collaborate):
In my experience, the lead author — where "lead" means "to whom most credit for this particular paper is due" — is almost always listed first. The last, "cleanup," position is frequently a honorific for the most senior person, frequently the lab director; it may therefore be more significant than the middle positions, but not more so than the first position.
Co-authors may reduce the potential for misunderstanding by including a note, if relative credit is not made sufficiently clear by order: eg,"authors are listed alphabetically, their contributions are equal."
Rebecca: That criteria call for judgment in their application does not defeat them as criteria. And, when criteria are applied to matters that are intrinsically vague and uncertain, judgment is required. Further work on the social epistemology and ethics of authorship will not eliminate the vagueness and uncertainty. Should this hypothesis turn out to be falsified, then we will have an algorithm for the precise assignment of co-authorship – an unlikely outcome to further investigation in the social epistemology and ethics of co-authorship.
Because judgment cannot be avoided, variation in judgment cannot be avoided. The goal is to prevent uncontrolled variation and achieve disciplined variation. Perhaps research into the social epistemology and ethics of authorship could provide the basis for increased discipline and therefore more deliberative and more reliable judgments about co-authorship. One way to manage uncertainty right now is to put the burden of proof on the applicability of a criterion: uncertainty about its application means that it does not apply. Co-authorship must be earned and not, as was common in the past, assumed.
How well do the criteria in the JAMA form perform in guiding judgment about the cases presented in this string? Ben Hale’s (2-28) examples meet criteria D1 and D2. In Bruce Gabrana’s example, if the colleague who cut the paper down to 7000 words did so in the role of an editor, leaving intact the conceptual design and methods of the paper, then D1 is not met. (An acknowledgement is owed.) Mike Otsuka is correct about Bruce’s example: if the colleague does more than edit but also reshapes the design and methods of the paper, then D1 is met. It is probably the case that some professors meet the criteria for co-authorship when mentoring graduate students, as Brian Weatherson points out. Whether this is pedagogically wise is a matter to consider on another day.
Neal Tognazzini is correct that there are no “precise” criteria to guide us in making judgments about co-authorship. Given the intrinsic vagueness and uncertainty of co-authorship, we should, following Aristotle’s admonition, aim for reliable, not precise, criteria. Reliable criteria can be improved. But that current criteria are later improved does not render current unreliable.
How co-authored papers should be assessed in the promotion and tenure process and how one should assess the scholarly accomplishments of colleagues whose work is co-authored are judgments dependent on legitimate claims to co-authorship. Part of the skepticism expressed about co-authorship is a function of the abuse of co-authorship. Part of the skepticism is also due, in my view, to the taken-for-granted culture of single authorship in philosophy. The latter skepticism should be put aside.
I agree, Donald. In fact, it seems (much) more plausible that the empirical research itself would merely help to *support* the premises of a proper philosophical argument. But the philosophical argument, not the empirical research, is the centerpiece. And I agree, in most cases, most any first-semester grad student could probably do the relevant empirical research. I would rather not count first or second author (rather, just alphabetically) in philosophy, but if forced to pick in a case like the one under consideration, it seems the empirical gruntwork would get one second, rather than first, authorship on a *philosophy* paper.
Bruce Gabana's Case 1 is very interesting. I think this is the sort of case that can cause greatest problems. A senior faculty member might throw out an idea for a paper in a colloquium or in the pub, and suggest to a grad student, postdoc, or junior faculty member that they should work on it. But whether or not this gives them any right to co-authorship depends on the nature of the idea. If they merely suggest a research question — "Wouldn't it be interesting to see how much mathematics we can recover from foundational theory X?" or "What does Kantianism have to say about moral issue Y?" — I certainly feel they shouldn't claim any sort of co-authorship, though they might expect to be included in the acknowledgements or in a footnote. However, if they suggest an entire line of argument that the paper then makes precise and develops in some detail — "I can see that Theorem Z can't be proved in foundational theory X because surely such-and-such is a model of X in which Z fails" or "Kantianism says that issue Y should be resolved in this way because the opposite couldn't be willed as a universal maxim for such-and-such a reason" — then it seems to me that they could claim co-authorship.
Of course, there will be borderline cases between research question and line of argument, so this will still call for some judgement. But I think there is a danger that the sort of senior faculty whom doris refers to as "lunatic megalomaniacs" throw out pretty inchoate ideas and then — either implicitly or explicitly — put pressure on junior faculty to work for six months on that idea and include them as a co-author on the final version. And it would be useful in this thread to give junior members of the profession some guidance as to when they should resist that pressure.
(Since I have co-authored quite a lot, and mainly with senior faculty, I should make absolutely clear here that my experiences of it have been entirely positive and I have never felt any pressure to do more work on a paper than was fair. I refer here only to horror stories I have heard from others. Indeed, my own experiences are pretty much as Ben Hale describes: the senior faculty put in a *lot* of time helping me and teaching me while we were writing the paper in ways that taught me a lot for my single author papers.)
Regarding the 'editor' debate above, it occurs to me that one can easily find books crediting author X and editor/translator Y, but I don't recall ever having seen a journal paper crediting an editor or translator. I assume one could include this in an acknowledgement, but in the case of books the editor or translator is usually named on the cover, rather than acknowledgements.
If the only way to credit someone for a journal article is as 'author' then it may be that we should think of authorship of a journal article as encompassing a wider range of activities than simply writing it. It is possible that people named on a paper are better understood as 'contributors' rather than 'authors' and that contribution may include editorial work, where that's very significant in shaping the final form of the paper. (Indeed, do all journals explicitly identify those named as authors?)
I think this would be necessary if one could be a co-'author' for coming up with an initial idea even without doing any of the actual writing. It is also, as I understand it, common in sciences (the person who provided the lab/funding is usually credited as an author even if they had nothing to do with the paper).
I'm not necessarily endorsing this as a direction we should head in. Perhaps we should resist it, but it does seem to explain practices accepted in some disciplines and to allow an editor to be credited.
How are people justifying treating a co-authored paper as less than a full publication for things like tenure review?
I've co-authored three papers thus far. Two of which were equal authorship (one published, another R+R) — and we note this in a footnote — and the other was a primary authorship (also published). Every one of these papers is far better than it would have been if I merely tried to write it on my own.
One mistaken assumption I think the "less than a full publication" people are making is assuming that since it's *one* publication, and two or more people worked on it, then they worked on it less than if they had merely gone for a single-authored paper. I think that this is false, or at least such people need to provide an argument for that point, rather than treating it as obvious. Moreover, if we treat co-authorship as obviously "a full publication," I have a couple single-authored papers that took me about 30min to write, and maybe a couple hours of editing over a week or two, but I have a co-authored paper that took many hours over a few months. Why should the latter be obviously "less than a full publication" for me?
I really enjoy co-authoring papers. It suits my work habits well, and I produce better philosophy for it. If people treat them as "less than a full publication," then l'm being disincentivized to do *better* philosophy!
Mark wrote: 'Writing *only* coauthored papers is something that less clearly presents evidence of continued contribution. The mixture seems to me greater than the sum of its parts in this context. I guess that's partly because being able to write a good paper on one's own is evidence that one is contributing more than just stenography to a joint project.'
I really hope that the profession moves away from this. This is the individualistic ideal of philosophy, and I worry that it's holding us back. Thanks to feminist and social epistemology, we should recognize that no one is an epistemic island: single-authored papers only carry the illusion that the author is the sole source of the ideas. We speak to each other, talk out our ideas, present them at conferences and get feedback, and we have colleagues provide comments (or even editing services) on our papers. The difference between this and co-authorship is not always so clear, and this is one reason why we shouldn't *obviously* privilege single-authored papers, and assume that they are to be treated with more respect than co-authored papers.
Is the work good? That's all that should matter. I can understand the potential worry that if someone only publishes co-authored papers, then it may be unclear what *their* contributions were. But if this isn't a problem for the tenure cases for other disciplines that have, essentially, exclusively co-authored papers, why should it be a problem for philosophy?
This has more to do with the sociology of philosophy, and our history, than with good, principled reasons, I suspect.
(Disclosure: My own work has been mostly single-authored, though I do have one co-authored paper.)
From experience, in a variety of contexts where philosophers are being evaluated and co-authored papers are involved, here are a couple of considerations that can come up:
If a co-authored work is very good, and of the high quality that one, but not the other, of the authors consistently produces on her own, there will be a tendency to think the value of the paper is coming from the author who consistently works at that level. Generally, rightly or wrongly, in doing a lot of co-authored work, you open yourself up to doubts about your contributions that can be raised by someone who's backing a rival candidate. (I think this is becoming less of a problem for those who do a lot of co-authoring as philosophers are getting more used to evaluating cases involving lots of co-authored work.)
On the positive side, the fact that someone does a lot of co-authored work is often (quite reasonably, I think) cited as a reason to think they generally work well with others, that their presence will help the work of their colleagues, etc.
With respect to MacKinnon's points: for the purposes of tenure, everyone is indeed an island. We don't yet tenure groups or hive-minds. The fact that MacKinnon admits that "every one of these papers is far better than it would have been if I merely tried to write it on my own" is a good justification for not treating co-authored papers as equivalent in value to single authored papers because we are, like it or not, still trying to evaluate individuals.
VOP: why does it follow from (my) co-authored papers being better than sole-authored papers, that we should treat co-authored papers less than sole-authored papers? (I'm inferring that that's what you meant. If it's not, I apologize.) From co-authored papers being better — at least counterfactually — than had I written it alone, this doesn't diminish the value of my sole-authored papers in the least. Certainly, if you tried to write a paper 100% on your own, it's better if you have some help, no? (We seem conveniently to ignore the role of referees' comments on many of our papers in making them better.)
P.S. It's McKinnon, not MacKinnon.
Like Rachel, I hope that our profession can move away from the outdated epistemological model of the isolated brilliant philosopher. A better understanding of what co-authored work involves, and a better recognition of this in tenure decisions would be a good step in this direction.
Most of my work is co-authored. My co-author is often the same person, namely my partner (I also have work co-authored with other philosophers and cognitive scientists). My partner and I are both untenured philosophers (I am slightly more senior). We discuss philosophy a lot, and will often spontaneously and informally come up with a new idea for a paper. After some more systematic research on the topic of choice, one of us (who becomes the lead author of the paper) writes up the paper. We then discuss it, rewrite it, and send it. This is how it's worked for the past years. I have no idea to gauge how high the exact percentage of my contribution for each paper is, given the stochasticity and informality of this process.
Cognitive scientists who read our work say we make a wonderful team. Never, not once, did any of them suggest we should write more papers on our own to show "clear evidence of continued contribution." Philosophers, on the other hand, have cautioned me to write more single-authored papers. They say this with the best intentions, of course.
Rachel is right that social epistemology and feminism provide good models here. Even if my co-authored papers turned out to be of higher quality than my single-authored papers, there can be several reasons for this. For one thing, when you collaborate, you will sometimes need to be able to convince your co-author that an idea is worthwhile, something they don't always agree to. I find this disagreement very productive, however, since it entices me to provide better arguments (after all, if I can't even convince my co-author, I will probably not be able to convince the referees either!) Since the co-author is also an interested party, s/he will fight harder against ideas that s/he doesn't agree with entirely than a friendly colleague who comments on your work. So the ideas that tend to survive tend to be better argued.
For this reason, as most people who have actually co-written a paper have agreed with me, a co-authored paper takes *at least* as much work as a single-authored contribution, and I find it takes more work.
I agree with Rachel McKinnon's reply to VOP. That co-authored publications are better than they would be otherwise is *not* (as VOP thinks) good justification for not treating co-authored papers as equivalent in value to single-authored papers. If VOP could say more in defense of why he/she thinks this, this would be helpful–as the claim as stated doesn't make much sense.
I guess what I meant was this: in giving someone tenure, we want to know, what is their best work, not what is their best work when aided by a co-author. If a given paper is otherwise better than it would have been if the author had written him or herself, then we don't really know what the author's best work is. Does this make more sense? Maybe not. This may apply more in cases in which we have a new PhD all of whose published work is co-authored with their advisor. I am not against co-authoring in general, just that it is reasonable to take a skeptical stance on it given that it makes it harder to tell how truly good a candidate really is.
I found this thread very interesting, since I am now writing my first co-authored paper.
Perhaps I am a bit naive, but two things seem pretty clear to me:
(a) Co-authored papers are in principle better than single-authored ones. If I think about my experience, I looked for a co-author for this paper, since I uderstood that my arguments would have been stronger if there were developed even in the field of Greek linguistics (a research field which is unknown to me; the paper is on textual criticism of a passage of ancient logic texts). Happily, I found a learned co-author, who understood my needs, and who takes responsibility for this part of the argument.
(b) From (a), it does not follow that these papers cannot be trusted, if we want to judge the quality of their authors. As I said, I might be naive, but I think that to acknowledge our own weaknesses, and to try to find a reasonable solution to them (say, asking somebody who may help us) is a good evidence of the quality of the co-authors of a paper.
It would be silly to ask me to learn Greek linguistics for a paper, as it would be silly to ask my co-author to learn logic for the same purpose. however, both skills were needed for that paper.
Somehow, despite the epistemological obstacle VOP is worried about, disciplines that always (or very close to always) co-author manage to make tenure decisions. The idea that we as a discipline* should be cautious about co-authoring "because tenure" is too bizarre to take seriously.
* This allows of course that junior faculty in departments with people who engage in handwringing about co-authoring might have individual reasons to exercise caution.
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