Co-authorship with the supervisor

[Lottie]

What merits inclusion of a supervisor as co-author on a Social Science journal article? If the PhD student has done all planning, fieldwork and writing on their own, the work is their own, and the supervisors have not been directly involved, is the student still 'obliged' to include the supervisors on the paper? I don't, in theory, have a problem with this, but if I wish to use that paper (albeit in a slightly altered form) in my thesis, would having it out there as 'co-authored' be a negative? Would my work (and the extent to which it is 'my' work) be questioned?

[rising_star]

In my social science field, your supervisor would NOT be a co-author on the publication you describe. Whether or not co-authored publications can be included in your thesis depends on your departmental and university regulations.

[TakeruK]

I just want to add that even in my non-social science field, where we almost always put our supervisor as a co-author because they are much more involved in our projects, we can still use our peer-reviewed published papers verbatim in our PhD dissertations. Some variations in policy probably exist between different programs though. However, the prevailing policy I see at many institutions is that whenever you include a paper with coauthors, you must also include a statement at the beginning of your thesis detailing what you actually wrote yourself. Some programs require you to only include papers where you wrote all of the material but other programs will let you include material that you did not write yourself, as long as your own material is greater than some fraction, and that you have the required permissions from the coauthors.

 

You should definitely check the thesis policies for both university and department of course, but just letting you know that co-authorship of a paper (and even if you are not the first author) can sometimes still be allowed.

[redsfan2014]

I think it is something you have to talk with your supervisor about. There are advisors/supervisors that will never let their students put them as an author on a paper, even as second authors, when they contributed significantly. There are also advisors who will put their names first on a paper after a student came up with an idea, conducted all of the research, wrote the whole paper, and presented at conferences...by themselves. I have even heard of reviewers who are added as an author to a paper if their reviews are significant enough to the paper. It varies and should definitely be something you talk with your supervisor about before you submit your paper.

I am co-authoring a paper with my undergraduate research mentor. I did all of the research, helped design the conference poster, and helped developed the thesis/methodology when he just mentioned his project to me in passing. He is doing all of the writing, and he is the one who is a tenured professor with a great reputation in our field. I was astonished when he put me as second author on our paper. Maybe it was because I did the work as an undergraduate, but I felt like writing the paper should be what constitutes authorship. If you did practically all of the work, especially the writing, and you just kept your supervisor updated, then I say you should get first or even sole authorship. 

[QASP]

There are also advisors who will put their names first on a paper after a student came up with an idea, conducted all of the research, wrote the whole paper, and presented at conferences...by themselves.

 

These things are field dependent. While what bluegrass502 describes above does happen, within my social science field it would be considered unethical to do this. Unfortunately there are unethical PI's out there. But the general standard in the social sciences (and definitely in my field) is that the order of authorship is determined by the amount of work done, and one should be significantly involved at most/all stages in order to gain authorship on a paper at all. I wish a better job could be done of monitoring this and making sure it's so, but alas.

 

Some of those questions, Lottie, are also dependent on your school. Some programs expect that you will essentially take a project that your advisor is already working on, handle most of the hard work, be published as first/second author on the paper, and create your thesis out of that no problem. Others would absolutely frown on co-authored work on a thesis. If there isn't a handbook for your program with clear standards for this, maybe ask an advanced student who has been through the process? Of course from what you're describing you should probably be sole author on the paper anyway, but academia doesn't always work that way.