What are standards of co-authorship?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a perplexed reader writes:

What are the standards of honest co-authorship in philosophy? I have recently been asking around to fellow grad students, and in one case, one person reported drafting the entire paper by themselves, receiving feedback by their supervisors, and being asked to add their names as co-authors. In another case, the student recounted a similar story, except this time they acknowledged that the more senior person's ideas were what made the paper worth submitting to a journal in the first place, even though the student wrote the draft entirely by themselves. In a third case, the student researched and wrote all but the introductory/'background' sections of the paper, but the paper is still billed as an even co-authorship. Are these students being exploited, or is this normal?

These are excellent questions. Given that co-authorship is relatively uncommon in philosophy (but seemingly increasing!), I'm hoping we can have a good discussion. One reader submitted the following response:

I work on authorship, and I have co-authored with a number of people, junior, senior, and peers. This is a complex set of questions you ask. Further, one cannot reliably know what happened if you just hear one person's story. The other co-authors might see things very differently. If the various students you mention feel exploited, then they need to talk with an ethics person on campus, that is, someone involved in research integrity. At many universities there is usually a committee. But they can initially talk with a member of such a committee.

I think this follow-up is broadly correct: co-authorship is complex, and as a spouse of someone who works in a STEM field, I've experienced many of these complexities second-hand. My sense is that in science, there doesn't seem to be any exact standard of how to settle co-authorship (including the order of co-authors listed). Instead, there appear to be some general rules of thumb that co-authors often broadly negotiate these matters according to, but which are not always respected (and indeed, in some cases--all too many cases, in fact--abused). Allow me to explain, and then open things up for discussion.

Although I could be wrong, here's one general rule of thumb that often seems to me to be used in science:

1. The person who comes up with the main paper idea (i.e. study or experiment idea) should presumptively be first-author. 

Here, in turn, is the rationale for this rule: the paper wouldn't even exist without them! Consequently, sometimes first authors aren't the main people actually drafting the paper. They are instead the person whose ideas inspired the paper, and it may fall in large part to the second, third, or fourth authors to do much of the drafting and data analysis. However, again, the above only seems to be a rule of thumb. For there are other rules of thumb, like this one: 

2. The person who does the most amount of the work contributing to the paper should be first author. 

Oftentimes, (1) and (2) will single out the same person. For example, the person who comes up with the main paper idea may also be the person primarily responsible for developing the study's methodology, data collection, or even data analysis. Consequently, in cases like these (where rules of thumb 1 and 2 converge), the person who should be listed as first-author will generally be clear to everyone. Responsibilities for drafting the paper may fall mainly to the second, third, and/or other author(s), as in science at least, paper drafting is often less work than coming up with paper ideas, experimental designs, data collection, and so on--all in broad conformity with the following, third rule of thumb:

3. Order of authorship should be broadly decided in terms of (a) amount and (b) quality of contribution to the final product.

Of course, this rule of thumb is open to a lot of interpretation--and my sense is that good co-authors usually try to sort these things out in ways that everyone involved believes to be broadly fair. This doesn't always happen, however, and my sense is that it is not uncommon in science for some people to think "I should have been first author" or "I did more work than the second author, and think it's a bit unfair that I'm listed as third author." But, oftentimes, my sense is that people don't raise too much of a fuss over these things unless it is really clear that things are amiss. Finally, though, there can be serious issues of power imbalances and abuses thereof, such as 'famous advisors' or early-career hotshots in need of tenure who notoriously put themselves as 'first author' on their grad students work. My sense is that these kinds of things are unfortunately common in science, and that bad actors are fairly widely known but little is usually done because of their positions of power and prestige (and furthermore, that often the safest recourse for grad students is to simply avoid having these people as dissertation advisors or mentors). On the flip side, my sense is that in the sciences, people generally think of 'good advisors' as erring in the opposite direction--that is, in the direction of listing students as first-authors, even if in reality it's probably the advisor who deserves that position. Whether this is a good thing is another story, as I've heard the obvious worry that it is deceptive, passing off the advisor's ideas as the students in order to help the student get first-authored publications (and, of course, a job!). These, I think, are all 'moral hazards' endemic to co-authorship, and I don't know of any foolproof method in the sciences for avoiding them. It is, as they say, what it is. 

Anyway, that's my broad impression of how things tend to be dealt with in science. It is another question of how well the above rules of thumb extend to work in philosophy, and what should be done in philosophy. Here, I'm not sure. I've heard there are some examples of co-authors writing in a footnote something like 'both authors contributed equally to this paper.' But, I'm not entirely sure that I like this, as it seems to me a bit 'nickel and diming' to fuss over who contributed how much. I've co-authored a couple of pieces--one with a faculty colleague at another university, and one with an undergraduate student--and in both cases the works have been deeply collaborative, the result of us working through ideas together in conversation and in paper drafts. Consequently, in both cases, the very idea of an 'order of authors' actually seems to me to make little sense. It can be hard to get any determinate sense of who should be listed as first-author, given the way the project evolved--and so, it seems to me, the proper thing to do is to simply have the co-authors negotiate these things with each other with integrity, erring (I think) on the side of correcting for any power imbalances. But, of course, things don't always go so well, and people can abuse power imbalances--just as, again, occurs all too often in the sciences. I don't have any clear solutions to these kinds of problems, and to be frank, it seems to me that people working in the sciences often don't have any great solutions to them either--making 'problem cases' fairly common, but what should be done about them deeply unclear.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. What are yours? 

Comments

[anonymous junior faculty]

the footnote with "both authors contributed equally to this paper" might seem like nickel and diming/fussing to you, but it is extremely important to many people's promotion and tenure cases that they have documentation of how much work they did on the paper. (I can tell you that I don't/haven't coauthored, but I've still received advice on this from multiple people, e.g. at tenure advice panels at my university.) If you don't have the footnote, then the people evaluating them only have their word for it. The footnote is a way of the *other* author stamping approval on terms, so that people evaluating the case don't either need to trust the candidate (which I agree they mostly ought to, but that's not what happens), or go seek out the co-author and ask them for their candid feedback.

[Marcus Arvan]

anonymous junior faculty: Ah, that's a very good point!

[anon]

Just to answer the original questioner in a direct way, my own answer is "yes, probably" for cases 1 & 3 but not for 2.

(I think 1 & 3 wouldn't be exploitative if there were a footnote indicating that the supervisors did less than half the work, but say "probably" because my guess is that there is no such footnote.)

[Postdoc]

Just to be clear: some of these cases are majorly not okay. For example:

"One person reported drafting the entire paper by themselves, receiving feedback by their supervisors, and being asked to add their names as co-authors"

There is no world in which this qualifies as acceptable behavior.

[Marcus Arvan]

Oops, yeah I'm sorry that I didn't respond to the OP's cases more directly! I usually try to do so, and am sorry that I merely focused on more general issues.

In any case, I agree that 1 & 3 in the OP are really bad/exploitive. 2 is a bit more of a 'grey area', given that the senior person came up with the main idea--but even here, I'm inclined to think it is probably a bit problematic for one person to do all of the writing, especially given the power imbalance that is plausibly involved between a senior person and a junior author. But I'm curious what others think.

[Michel]

I've collaborated on a few papers, though none have been published yet. To my mind, there should first be an explicit agreement that the paper will be co-authored, and then both parties need to follow through on that commitment by making substantive contributions. If not, then someone gets dropped.

Beyond that, I favour the footnote plus an alphabetical ordering.

[Tim]

I am not sure that its best to think of the issue in terms of "standards," that one might pass or fail. It might be better to think in terms of paradigms and similarity to them.

I have coauthored a number of times. Each time, each person contributed at every stage--generating ideas, doing readings, taking notes, drafting material, editing material, etc. For me, that's the paradigm of co-authorship; each person equally participates at every stage. The three cases OP mentions deviate from this paradigm in various ways. It seems to me that the first and second cases aren't cases of coauthoring; the third might be, but it is too under described.

I wouldn't put as much emphasis on Marcus' 1. The main idea for a paper might come from a coauthor ...or a coworker or friend or random person on the street. Merely coming up with an idea shouldn't be enough to qualify for authorship, nonetheless primary author--at least in the humanities.

[Shen-yi Liao]

Going beyond the practical, there is substantial philosophical scholarship on the point of authorship, which include various recommendations. My most recent favorite is

https://philpapers.org/archive/HABWTP-2.pdf

which also includes a review of this literature, as well as offering a very innovative proposal of its own.

More practically, I think the ICMJE recommendations are currently prominent in the sciences, and it seems in principle applicable to philosophy.

http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html

By these recommendations, the second and third cases from the original post could reasonably be considered co-authored.

Though, like other commentators, I agree that it would be best to explicitly discuss and note different authors' contributions. Here are some suggestions from AP(sych)A:

https://www.apa.org/science/leadership/students/authorship-paper

[a co-author]

Tim
Some of the projects I have worked on involve working with people with skill sets and knowledge that I do not have - and I am not going to learn. In turn, they were working with me because I had knowledge and skills they lacked. This is pretty normal - indeed, standard - in many fields and in a lot of discipline crossing work.
And the idea that you can settle authorship issues at the start is often misguided. The only "fight" I had over authorship was when me and my co-author kept insisting that the other deserves to be first author - we were both grateful for the other's contribution.

[Assistant Professor]

Building on Shen-yi Liao's post with helpful resources, in addition to the ICMJE link about defining authorship in medical journals, many medical or medicine-related journals (including the Journal of Medical Ethics which many philosophers appear in) require authors to indicate on the publication itself how they each contributed to the publication. This makes explicit the kind of thing "anonymous junior faculty" pointed out is often missing but relevant to promotion files.

The other things to say about STEM fields is that the LAST author is generally the "senior" author (the person who runs the lab the work came out of, the person who overall mentors the project) and this last authorship actually comes with prestige rather than being viewed as having contributed the least to the project. These projects often involve MANY authors so it is a bit different than say a two-author philosophy paper where the lead author likely did the bulk of the conceptual and writing work and the second author could just as easily be their peer, but it is to say some of the norms at work in one field may be different than in another field and this is important to pay attention to if doing inter-disciplinary work.

Michel seems to suggest co-authorship should be presumed to be equal and the default should be alphabetical order and a footnote explaining the nature of the collaboration. It is incredibly hard to develop and write an idea in a completely equal way, but even if you do, if you frequently write with the same person then I would at least alternate who is the first author each time you write with that person so that you each appear as lead authors some of the time. This stuff actually does matter for optics, and a lot of people will see your citations but not necessarily open your paper and read the footnote to see you it was "an equal collaboration between both authors." It would not benefit the person whose name appears later in the alphabet to look like someone chronically capable of only playing second fiddle to someone else's lead.