Does one really have to consider having a co-author to avoid being considered as a nerd?

Question

I have just graduated in B.A.Sc. Within my undergraduate studies, I had been considerably active in research, such that I succeeded to publish a paper on my own at a well-known conference.

At the conference and after the presentation, a very experienced professor asked me to present him some more details about the applied methodology into the paper. His tendency to my research paper fully diminished, as hew saw the list of authors and realized that I am the sole author. He advised me that such of research might not be so noticeable and the community may take such authors as nerd people. Furthermore, he explained that such research reports would not consist of coherent enough accomplishments, due to the lack of any effect of the idea cooking that could be acquired by co-operation with the other researchers. The ironic stuff is that, before he found that the paper has just one author, his attitude regarding the paper and its content was gratifying, deservedly!

My questions are:

• Is this viewpoint an overall and widespread idea among researchers?
• If the ideas, simulations, manufacturing and the other stuff for a paper were done by a single person, should this person consider faking some co-authorship for the paper to avoid presenting themselves as a nerd to others?

Answer 1

There are reasons to be more careful about sole-author papers from young investigators, but pretty much none of them are the ones this professor told you.

I would be more cautious when considering a sole-author work from a young investigator simply because inexperience plus lack of supervision means there are more likely to be mistakes. These might be in the technical work, the scoping of the problem, the design of the investigation, or the interpretation of results. On the other hand, if your paper went through meaningful peer review, that's a pretty good initial filter for simple mistakes, and that means I'm likely to take the paper as seriously as any other that's made it through peer review (i.e., still with significant skepticism, but assuming basic sanity).

None of this, however, has anything to do with gratuitously insulting an undergraduate investigator. I would consider the professor you describe to be both a fool and a bully. Perhaps this attitude is widespread in the community where you published, perhaps it is not; certainly, there are toxic scientific communities.

I would thus advise you, if you want to continue working in that area, to keep doing so and meeting more investigators. If you find they are more constructive in their criticism, then ignore the first, nasty person that you interacted with. If you find the first scientist was representative in their attitude, then find a better scientific community to participate in.

Answer 2

...and presents him/her to the others as a nerd, does he/she have to consider some fake co-authorship for the paper?!....

No, you should not breach ethics because you think people might think you are a nerd if you don't.

Answer 3

If you are the only one that has worked on the paper, then the paper should only have your name on it.

However, to learn how to write good papers, initially needs some kind of mentoring, in most cases. Also in many disciplines (including mine - CS) sole-author papers are the minority. Collaboration with other people will improve your papers, since other researchers may be stronger in some aspects (e.g., programming, experiment design, writing) of producing papers than you. Thus, you should not aim to do everything yourself, if you can collaborate with other people and share ideas and implementations. And sometimes learning to collaborate is a more important skill than writing papers.

Answer 4

Furthermore, he explained that such research reports would not consist of coherent enough accomplishments, due to the lack of any effect of the idea cooking that could be acquired by co-operation with the other researchers.

The grain of truth in this is that most collaborations are inspiring, but:

• Collaborations do not make papers or results more coherent. Many collaborative works suffer from the effect of too many cooks spoiling the broth. More specifically, every coauthor contributes their part without paying much attention to things working together or during the writing process, there is a clash of different ideas how papers should look like. The results are often rather loose patchworks than coherent, streamlined products.

  Now, I have also participated in collaborative papers where this was not the case – but this was usually due to the first author taking the lead and not due to collaborative efforts. But even in those good collaborations, the coherence was en par with my single-author papers (at least in my humble opinion and going by the reviewer’s comments).

• Not every multi-author paper is collaborative. At least in my field, a considerable portion of papers is mainly the work of the first author, with the other author(s) being supervisor(s), whose contribution mainly consists of outlining the research project and helping with the writing. On top of this there is the huge portion of papers where the supervisor is added for no reason other than being the supervisor (ignoring authorship ethics).

• Being a single author does not mean that you do not communicate your ideas to others; it just means that none of them could make an addition to your work that justifies authorship. The paper of mine whose contents I discussed with most other researchers ended up being a single-author paper, because none of them found a major flaw or something to add to it. Also with no other paper of mine did I put that much effort in ensuring a thorough internal review.

• Co-authors are not necessarily better at finding flaws than peer reviewers. This particularly applies to the papers authored by a PhD student and their supervisor which are common at least in my field. The student often learned a great deal of techniques from the supervisor and thus they can only inspire each other to a certain extent. In contrast, a peer reviewer has a fresh take at the work and a different perspective. Moreover, the supervisor will usually not check a lot of details of the work that do not end up in the final paper and hence are available to the peer reviewers.

  Moreover, with papers with a large number of authors, it may very well happen that not all of them read the paper thoroughly. I once reviewed a paper with five or six authors, which proposed a complicated measure that was bound to always yield 1 as a result (they did not apply this measure though). While I found it plausible that one author made this mistake, I found it much more likely that none of the co-authors even read this part than that they did not notice this.

To conclude, the number of authors is a bad metric for paper quality. In particular, many papers that are equally prone to suffer from the alleged problems of single-author papers have multiple authors.

Answer 5

I totally agree with jakebeal's answer, but I'd like to add another possible motivation for the professor caution (however weirdly phrased). It might not apply to your case, but let me add it for the sake of completeness.

There are fields, like mathematics, computer science and theoretical physics, where publications with a single author are not at all uncommon, and PhD students are even expected to be able to produce a single-author publication.

There are other fields, especially in the experimental sciences, where publications with a single author are virtually non-existent, or limited to specific cases, simply because it would not be possible for an only person, however experienced they might be, to manage a complex experiment or to understand it correctly with respect to the state of the art.

In the latter case, an experienced researcher in front of a single-author publication from a student might think that the student actually received significant contributions from other people, but they chose not to appear as authors to boost the student's strength for some, possibly questionable, purpose (e.g. in view of an application for a position or an award).