Co-authorship between Faculty and Graduate Students in

Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania

December, 1999

The Graduate Council of the Faculties has adopted a policy requiring individual departments to develop and post guidelines regarding faculty-student co-authorship. This policy is to reflect the prevailing standards in each discipline. The following set of guidelines is proposed for the University of Pennsylvania Sociology Department.

1. Process. Faculty should discuss the issue of authorship with their graduate student collaborators when beginning a joint project. The faculty member should indicate whether the student is going to share authorship credit, what order of author is anticipated, and what division of labor on the project is expected. Since the relative contributions of authors often changes over the course of a project, the faculty member and student should agree on when these issues will be revisited -- for example, at the end of the semester of an independent study, at the end of a summer research assistantship, when a proposal is due for a conference, when a draft is ready for submission to a journal. A brief memo summarizing the agreement regarding authorship and the division of labor may be helpful, but such a written agreement is not required. Disputes are to be referred to the Chair of the Graduate Program, and, if not resolved, the Department Chair, and the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies of the School of Arts and Sciences.

2. Criteria for Authorship.

A. General Principles: (a) Faculty and students take responsibility and credit, including authorship credit, only for work they have actually performed or to which they have contributed.

(b) Principal authorship and other publication credits accurately reflect the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their relative status. Mere possession of an institutional position, such as Department Chair, does not justify authorship credit. Minor contributions to the research or to the writing for publication are appropriately acknowledged, such as in footnotes or in an introductory statement.

(c) A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored article that is based primarily on the student's dissertation or thesis.

B. Specific factors that may serve as the basis for claims to authorship:

1. The Idea. An important consideration for authorship is based on an answer to the question "Whose idea was it?" Having the idea for the study is one basis for a claim to authorship, but most projects evolve over time and there are many revisions in the initial idea along the way. As a result, from time to time the relative intellectual contribution of joint authors may have to be reassessed.

2. The Literature Review. In some cases a faculty mentor will ask a graduate student to conduct a literature review on the topic of a jointly authored paper. Literature reviews may be extensive or focused, and may be directed to a greater or lesser degree by the faculty advisor. In some projects, an extensive literature review forms the basis of the subsequent research, whereas in other cases it plays a more limited role. At the minimal end of the continuum, literature reviews involve going to the library to xerox articles from a pre-established list. At the other extreme, literature reviews may take the form of long memos about previous research in a field, and go beyond summarizing individual papers to synthesize the findings in the field and the gaps in the literature. The more extensive and independent the literature review, and the more decisive with respect to the ideas developed in the paper, the more this contribution entitles one to authorship credit. But a literature review by itself typically would not be sufficient basis for authorship on a paper.

3. Data Collection. There are instances in which a faculty member may have spent years, even decades, collecting data on a particular topic, perhaps following a sample of individuals over time.

Such data collection efforts can be extremely expensive and time consuming. In collaborative research, "ownership" of the data can serve as the basis for a claim to authorship, yet there is much variation among faculty in this position. Some faculty may feel that ownership of the data under investigation entitles them to authorship of any paper that is based on these data. Some faculty may feel they are entitled to be first author in all such instances, while others may feel that second or third authorship is more appropriate. Still others vary authorship depending on the nature of the project at hand. Conversations about authorship are particularly important in cases where graduate student research is based on data collected by their faculty advisor. In other instances, the graduate student may have collected his or her own data and the faculty joins the student in shepherding the paper through the publication process. Here again, the fact that the student collected the data would typically entitle the student to some form of authorship recognition.

4. Data Analysis. In many cases of statistical research, a faculty member supervises the data analysis, which is conducted principally or exclusively by the graduate student. In some cases the graduate student receives a wage as a research assistant, while conducting tasks closely directed by the faculty advisors. Some faculty would feel this situation entitles the graduate student to no authorship credit, while others feel it is appropriate for graduate students to receive junior authorship credit in such cases. At the other extreme is a case where the graduate student selects the variables to be examined, makes many substantive decisions about the data analysis, and shapes the statistical approached used in the research. In this case, the graduate assistant certainly should receive credit and possibly authorship, although the scope of this contribution must be determined relative to inputs.

5. Writing. Writing the text of a paper often involves much more than simply summarizing the results of the data at hand. This is certainly true for qualitative work, where the selection of appropriate material from the rich body of collected data is an essential part of the research process. Writing is no less of a creative undertaking in research based principally on quantitative data. Sometimes the writing of a paper is shared, but more often one author takes the lead in writing a portion or the entire text. Many involved in collaborative research feel that writing is the decisive contribution, that whoever wrote the paper is entitled to be first author. Situations where the graduate student "did the research" but the faculty member "wrote the paper" may produce misunderstandings regarding authorship and credit. Collaborators should keep in mind that writing is an important component of the final project, but that there may be other important contributions as well.

6. Editing. Editing can range in intensity from light copy-editing to a thorough reworking of the text. Often one partner in a collaboration writes and the other edits. There may be several rounds of editorial revisions before a paper is published. Situations where one author drafted the paper and the other "substantially revised" or "re-wrote" it may well lead to disagreement about authorship and credit. Here, as before, writing and editing are both potentially important contributions to the final product.

7. Financial Remuneration. In some cases graduate students serve as paid research assistants working on faculty grants. In other cases joint projects are conducted as part of an independent study course, while in still other situations joint projects emerge simply out of common interest outside the nexus of courses and wages. Some faculty feel that students who are paid in wages are less entitled to authorship than student collaborators who are working for free. The latter group, it is thought, are "compensated" with authorship rather than with wages. Other faculty feel that only intellectual contribution and not salary should determine authorship. Students who work as paid research assistants for a faculty member are particularly dependent on that faculty member for both intellectual guidance and financial support. Consequently, it is particularly important for issues of authorship to be discussed in such cases.

8. Turf Disputes. When faculty member has collected a large data set, it is often the case that a series of papers, and perhaps one or more books, will be published from the project. One problem that can arise from this bounty is distinct aspects of the research can blur into one another. A worst case scenario is that there is conflict over who is going to work on a given aspect of the project. Another problem from the graduate student's viewpoint is that the juiciest projects are reserved for the faculty and other project members, and that he or she is "assigned" particularly barren terrain to plow. Faculty and students should periodically discuss these issues with graduate students, keeping the division of opportunities in mind.

9. Equal Authorship. As note above, the order of authorship will often reflect the order of contribution to the final product. There are also cases in which authorship is shared equally. Listing names alphabetically is one conventional way to indicate equal authorship. Articles sometimes begin with a footnote affirming that authorship is indeed equal.

Last Modified: 12-Nov-2003
For updates, comments please contact: saunderc@ssc.upenn.edu