Co-Authorship and Sharing Credit

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Toban Black

Every year, I tell myself that the Spring semester is going to be so much quieter than the Fall.  I tell myself I will set goals.  I will take this time to reflect and prioritize.  I will not get overwhelmed… And then, suddenly, it is April.  Response papers need to be graded, graduation ceremonies to be planned, and my inbox is proliferated with conference announcements for interesting events going on nationwide.  With those announcements come calls/requests for proposals to present, and eagerly, graduate students go into overdrive to assess their research and where it fits in to the conference theme.  As I entered this phase of my semester, I was lucky enough to have some great possibilities to propose to conferences, many of which were products of a research partnership.

As I began preparing the proposals, it occurred to me that I had little idea on how to properly determine the author order.  As I have gone through my professional career, I have seen different expectations for collaboration, ghost writing, and sharing of credit based on rank rather than the contribution to the research.  Some projects have been an egalitarian experience with appropriate credit-share.  Others have been more… let us say… inequitable.  Up until now, I never gave it much thought past the idea that this is what is customary based on age, notability, rank, etc.  What I failed to realize until I got further into the PhD process is that formalized guidelines do exist to help you figure out the complex puzzle of co-authorship.

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