Going it Alone: The Problem with Graduate Education in Disciplines that Value Solo Authorship

Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/04/10/going-it-alone-the-problem-with-graduate-education-in-disciplines-that-value-solo-authorship/

Working with students to get their publications ready for submission can take hours. I have recently been working with a superstar student from the Sociology department here at OSU. This student is bright, eager, motivated, and deliberate. We are working on a paper together, and the student is first author. We had our first formal meeting about research ideas in May 2012. By my count in my Outlook calendar, about 55 meetings later, in December 2013, we submitted a paper with the student as first author, me as second author, and my colleague as third author to the Journal of Marriage and Family [note I had a maternity leave during that year if that seems like a long time]. The longest meeting we had was scheduled for 2 hours.  I did a little work on the paper outside of our meetings, but primarily, most of my work on the paper was done side by side with the student.

photo credit: raganmd via photopin cc

photo credit: raganmd via photopin cc

The paper has received a revise and resubmit, and the student immediately started working on the revision (this student is awesome, right?).  By my count, we have met 12 times about the revision (the letter is almost done) and we still have to finalize the revised manuscript, which hopefully can be accomplished in maybe three or four more meetings (positive thinking!).  I estimate that we have had about 16 hours of meeting so far about the revision.

I review this to make the point that it takes a lot of work to get a manuscript from idea to completion. I have spent many hours with this student reviewing results, coding in Stata, creating datasets, examining output, and finally, co-writing. The co-writing probably takes the longest. Good academic writing takes much time to learn. The co-writing the student and I have done, including reading every section of the paper out loud and jointly rewriting and clarifying, has hopefully been very helpful for the student. I certainly believe the students’ writing has improved since we started working together, and the student is very appreciative of my time.

But, would I have done this if I were in a Sociology department, or some other discipline that values solo authorship?

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