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Best practices for co-authoring

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'd be interested to hear any thoughts about best practices for coauthoring. I'm starting a new position in the fall for which I'll be expected to coauthor with faculty members on a significant number of papers. I've coauthored a few times in the past, but the process varied significantly for each one depending on the people involved, the topic of the paper, and the target journal.

Is it just inevitable that every collaboration is idiosyncratic? Or is there a standard approach for collaborations in philosophy?

Good questions. Does anyone have any helpful insights to share?

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6 responses to “Best practices for co-authoring”

  1. Andrew

    Collaborations will all be idiosyncratic to some degree, but there are a couple things I would do in every case (more about procedure and less about collaboration style).
    (1) When an idea turns into an actual co-authoring project, have a conversation early on about who is going to contribute what (especially if there’s anything you implicitly expect the other person will do, or you think there’s anything they expect you will). And have a conversation early on about authorship order. For some people, this can be uncomfortable to bring up. But you don’t want to get to the end of a project thinking that you’re first author because you did a large majority of the work, just to realize that a more senior author thinks they’re first author because they provided mentorship/facilities/etc. In my experience people often have different expectations about these things, and talking about this early on, tied to the conversation about who will do what work (and a recognition that roles might change and this might have to be revisited), saves a lot of trouble.
    (2) Make sure you’re on the same page about the goals of the project – again, early on. It’s common for those goals to diverge without co-authors realizing. E.g., one author might just want more publications quickly, while a junior author, on the market with a short publication record, wants each of their pubs to showcase their ability to do great work. It sucks to put a lot of work into something and then find out the project is going to look very different than you expected, or that it won’t contribute to your CV in the way you thought it would, or whatever. You can avoid some tension and wasted time if you know each other’s goals, and agree on what it would take for each of you to consider the paper finished and submittable.

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  2. junior faculty

    I definitely agree with the comment above: determine author order before writing. You can even use author order to organize work, e.g., I’m first-author so I’m responsible for getting the manuscript ready for submission when we are finished drafting, and I’ll be the main journal correspondence, etc.

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  3. anon

    An additional important source of information, especially given that this co-authorship is baked into the job for you rather than more “organic”, is to ask some of your future colleagues how it’s done there. Maybe try the most recently hired one if you don’t want to ask the more senior ones.

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  4. Bill V.

    It is worth noting that author order conventions are quite different in different parts of academia, so especially when you are dealing with folks from other departments (but even other subdisciplines in philosophy), ask them what author order means to them. (Last on the author list can mean most or least important.)
    This looks useful: https://provost.yale.edu/policies/academic-integrity/guidance-authorship-scholarly-or-scientific-publications
    The advice in point ten here seems wise:
    https://researchwhisperer.org/2019/05/07/learning-to-be-a-co-author/

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  5. Avoid Blame Game Pain

    Something is likely to go wrong with the writing of the paper at some point. No paper is perfect, after all, and no paper writing process is perfect.
    When that happens, avoiding the blame-game is the number one priority. The best strategy I know is to keep conversations specific and to focus on the next steps as much as possible.
    If you make it clear that you still respect your co-authors and appreciate their contributions (when it’s their fault) and apologise for the specific things you did (when it’s your fault) then you’ll find it much easier to get back to constructive efforts. The general rule is to keep every dispute specific and to shut down overgeneralizing comments like “You always do this” or “I am always the one who has to do everything”.

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  6. Daniel Weltman

    It is very idiosyncratic etc. but I do think there is at least one actual “best practice” that everyone ought to do, no matter what, in every circumstance. Each paper that is co-authored should include (e.g. as the first footnote or the last footnote) an author contribution statement, which outlines the role each other played in the creation of the paper.
    This is for a few reasons. First, because philosophy does not have established practices about author order, and because even if it did, different fields have different practices, it eliminates ambiguity. Second, even insofar as there are established practices about author order, the information communicated by name order is imperfect at best, so again the contribution statement eliminates ambiguity. Third, sometimes papers are not such that author order would usefully communicate this information, such as when the paper is equally co-authored by two people. In such cases, an author contribution statement is necessary to make clear that both contributors are equal contributors.
    On the topic of co-authoring generally, this is not a “best practice,” but what has worked with the one person I’ve co-authored with is that we talk over an idea, one person writes a draft, and then they send it over to the other person, who works on it, then sends it back, etc. Sometimes we meet to talk about it after a few drafts.

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