Timeline for Asking advisor to become co-author
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 3, 2022 at 21:21 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | The traditional convention in math is that advisors do not coauthor their student’s thesis paper regardless of whether the advisors contribution would be enough for coauthorship in any other situation. Whether this is a good convention is debatable, but it’s absolutely the tradition in mathematics. Mathematics is very much an outlier on this point. | |
| Aug 12, 2022 at 19:51 | vote | accept | Ryan Hendricks | ||
| Jul 21, 2022 at 21:04 | comment | added | Nobody | @AnderBiguri Fair enough. Apologies for turning it into an argument. | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 20:44 | comment | added | Ander Biguri | @Nobody I don't have the answers, I tell you what I observe around me, as a engineer impostor in a maths department hehe. I agree with you that what you say its how I was taught and my "culture" in my field. | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 19:19 | comment | added | Nobody | @AnderBiguri If that is so, then what was the content of the OP's "countless meetings" with their advisor? Even completely theoretical research involves working out the consequences of propositions, comparing them to known results, etc. I suppose that you are subsuming these within "the paper itself", but if you do that, then you also have to acknowledge that each author's proportional contribution to the paper goes beyond their individual word count; it has to include the thought they put into developing the paper's arguments and conclusions. | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 18:24 | comment | added | Ander Biguri | @Nobody In mathematics, often there is no other contribution than the paper itself. In engineering/physics, a paper is a way to present results of your research, in mathematics, the paper is (often) the totality of the research. If you prove some bounds of a PDE, there is no code, no experiment, no analysis, no interpretation. There is only the maths directly described in the paper. The nature of what is "research" also is very different in maths, so we (non mathematicians) are not used to it | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 18:21 | comment | added | Nobody | @AnderBiguri I guess you learn something new every day. That is very different from any of the several fields I've worked in, and at odds with the recommendations of other scientific organizations. (E.g., the AGU journals require only that all authors have "Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work"). In most other scientific fields leaving someone out because they contributed "only", say, 10% of the work would be considered straight-up plagiarism. | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 15:36 | comment | added | paul garrett | @Nobody, I myself am not-at-all "hands off". Ordinarily, I'd only suggest projects that I have a pretty good idea should work, and also how to execute. My task is to teach/coach a novice to be able to do that thing themselves. If I just wanted to write something up I'd probably do it myself. :) And, again, actual execution is typically more effort than perhaps "visualizing" the execution. :) | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 15:12 | comment | added | Ander Biguri | @Nobody in math, the culture is that you get coauhtorship if you have done at least half of the work (or a third, for 3 authors, etc). In math this often means writing half of the paper, proving half of the theorems etc. If the supervisor "guided" the research, that does not tend to be sufficient for coauthorship, as the bulk of the work was done by the student. I doubt most physics supervisors do half of the work themselves. I don't disagree with what you say, as an engineer working halfway with medical doctors and mathematicians, this is confusing. But it is how it is. | |
| Jul 21, 2022 at 13:47 | comment | added | Nobody | I'm flabbergasted by the idea that there are fields in which PhD advisor don't necessarily do enough to be co-authors on their students' papers. In physics and astronomy, an advisor that didn't contribute enough to justify co-authorship would be viewed as not doing their job as an advisor. Are PhD advisors in math really that hands off? | |
| Jul 20, 2022 at 20:06 | comment | added | paul garrett | @AnderBiguri, indeed. I probably should have emphasized the field-dependence more... | |
| Jul 20, 2022 at 15:51 | comment | added | Ander Biguri | Note for future readers: Academic culture is very different depends on the field. If you are in engineering, it is very bad if you don't add your advisor as coauthor. If you are in medicine, it is very bad if anyone that contributed to the data acquisition and funding are not coauthors. Check your field culture. | |
| Jul 19, 2022 at 23:57 | history | answered | paul garrett | CC BY-SA 4.0 |