Timeline for How to explain to a student that it is common to include a supervisor as a co-author?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 16, 2018 at 18:25 | comment | added | Eric | @JeffE Two questions: how common is it for PhD students under your supervision to have single author papers? What would the additional input delta be for you to consider a contribution worthy of authorship? | |
| May 16, 2018 at 18:09 | comment | added | JeffE | @Eric: Speaking as a card-carrying tenured computer scientist: Most of the activities you list are insufficient for co-authorship in my opinion, and in practice in my subfield. In particular, providing financial support, posing the research question, providing equipment, meeting regularly to hear progress and offer feedback, discussing presentation issues and publication venues, and reviewing the paper are together not enough for co-authorship. (If I thought those things were enough, I'd have a lot more papers.) | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 20:25 | comment | added | Eric | @NickS We may mostly agree. If a supervisor truly had no input, he or she should not be an author. However, I think that chance is good that when a student claims that his or her supervisor made no contribution, the student thinks doing the grunt work is the only thing that qualifies as a contribution and does not properly understand or recognize what the supervisor's contribution really was. In short, I think the majority of the time supervisors do do enough to be authors, which is why it is common to include them as authors and not that they are included simply because it is common. | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 19:33 | comment | added | Nick S | To make things clear, the way I see it, there are two possibilities: 1) The supervisor contribution to the project is strong or at least reasonable. In this case, he must be included because of his contribution (not because it is common). 2) His contribution is below minimal. You tell me what should be done in this case... | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 19:31 | comment | added | Nick S | You are arguing that a supervisor which contributes enough (and yes designing algorithms is a big contribution) should get credit, which everyone agrees on. But the question is not about contribution, is about convincing students that this is "common".. And being common in the field means that it is the norm even if the contribution is zero or close to zero..... | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 17:23 | comment | added | Eric | @NickS Again, research is not going through the motions to carry out an experiment or writing code to demonstrate an algorithm works, it's designing the experiment or the algorithm or whatever the equivalent is in your field. A good supervisor is actively contributing to this stage of the process. Just because it is the student who does most of the grunt work of executing the plan and typing up the results, doesn't mean the advisor has not contributed to the research. Refusing to credit the supervisor to me seems more a failure to recognize the supervisor's contribution. | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 15:23 | comment | added | Nick S | Isn't that exactly what a supervisor is supposed to do in the first place? He already gets credit for this both in his department and in his grant applications (training of personal, which for some grants is extremely important). My supervisor did all those things for me, and unless he actually had a direct contribution to the project he only expected to be mentioned in the Acknowledgement....Yes, I get it, in some department or some areas of science that is "the norm", but things should be done because they are right not because they always have been done this way... | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 11:28 | comment | added | Eric | @TheDoctor I think you're confusing what makes a direct contribution. The research is about the ideas to explore our hypotheses to test and how to do that. This is exactly where advisors contribute. Research is not necessarily the work of setting up and executing the experiment. This is why some bachelor's students mistakenly think they are primary contributors. Papers already have an acknowledgments section to thank those who helped carry out the mechanics of the research but did not "contribute". | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 11:20 | comment | added | Mark Rosenblitt-Janssen | @eric: That's fair, but see my answer on this Q on how to solve it. | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 11:19 | comment | added | Eric | @TheDoctor Like it or not, this is the way it works in computer science. Advisors are the lowest level managers of academia and as such they do contribute but in ways that the student does not always recognize or appreciate. | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 2:34 | comment | added | Mark Rosenblitt-Janssen | @Eric. Despite your points, this is not the way to go about this. Credentialed academics will ALREADY know that a paper is under the auspices of a given department, university, and (therefore) the present head. How far would you argue this? Did the President not also influence the direction of the department? Why not just include the President and all past Presidents of the United States? | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 18:59 | comment | added | Nick S | @SteveJessop I agree, with the comment in general. But this answer, if I understand it right, is saying that in many situations even if the student is doing the research, it is actually the supervisor which is subtly guiding the student on the right path, without the student knowing it. While this is actually often the case, I highly doubt it can be done in a very subtle way, so subtle that the student doesn't realizes he is guided, without the supervisor really understanding what happens there. | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 18:51 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | @NickS: well, if the paper uses multiple methods at different points then I think it's potentially quite a tricky point whether every co-author needs to fully understand every step of every section in order to claim co-authorship. Obviously it'd be better if they did, before putting their name to it, but I wonder in practice how many solid collaborative papers would actually have zero authors if this was strictly followed ;-) | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 17:34 | comment | added | Nick S | Good point, but I am curious how would your answer address the "a supervisor may not even understand a method used in a paper" at the end of the first paragraph of the question......Also IMO, one has to be carefull as a supervisor might also overestimate his contribution, and as a supervisor I would rather err by underestimating... | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 16:58 | history | answered | Eric | CC BY-SA 3.0 |