Sole authorship when getting hired as a prof... is it a BIG DEAL?

[spunky]

So....I have kind of a professional-type question for when you go out to apply for (academic) jobs, particularly tenure-track positions in Psych. 

 

In my department candidates are interviewing for a tenure-track position and one criticism I hear people in the hiring committee are making  is that many candidates do not have publications where they are sole authors. They have publications where they are the leading author (some in high-impact journals) but apparently not many are solo authors in them. 

 

Now, I have heard before that it's important for us to publish with many different people and not just with your adivsor or within your lab so you can demonstrate versatility. And that you should also aim for 1st or 2nd authorship... but does anyone know if sole authorship is becoming a thing now to get hired? Has anyone heard of this before?

[isilya]

So....I have kind of a professional-type question for when you go out to apply for (academic) jobs, particularly tenure-track positions in Psych. 

 

In my department candidates are interviewing for a tenure-track position and one criticism I hear people in the hiring committee are making  is that many candidates do not have publications where they are sole authors. They have publications where they are the leading author (some in high-impact journals) but apparently not many are solo authors in them. 

 

Now, I have heard before that it's important for us to publish with many different people and not just with your adivsor or within your lab so you can demonstrate versatility. And that you should also aim for 1st or 2nd authorship... but does anyone know if sole authorship is becoming a thing now to get hired? Has anyone heard of this before?

I haven't really heard of this. It makes sense in humanities disciplines, but not so much in the sciences where you usually have co-authors. Most of the solo-authored papers I've seen tend to be theoretical papers, which are rare for grad students to have in an experimental discipline. Going through my department's new hires over the last couple years I don't see anyone with solo-authored papers in fact...

[lewin]

I had to think long and hard to come up with ANY single author papers that weren't review papers, much less papers by junior people. The only ones that came to mind were secondary correlational analyses of large datasets (i.e., could be done by one person), and maybe one or two in personality psychology that were, e.g., factor analyses of large datasets. I just don't think that's how empirical psychology works nowadays, or most science. If anything, single authorship is becoming less of a thing, not more--as research requires more specialized equipment, funding, or interdisciplinary expertise, collaboration is becoming more common.

 

I see you're in quant, could this be a quant thing? 

[TheMercySeat]

So....I have kind of a professional-type question for when you go out to apply for (academic) jobs, particularly tenure-track positions in Psych. 

 

In my department candidates are interviewing for a tenure-track position and one criticism I hear people in the hiring committee are making  is that many candidates do not have publications where they are sole authors. They have publications where they are the leading author (some in high-impact journals) but apparently not many are solo authors in them. 

 

Now, I have heard before that it's important for us to publish with many different people and not just with your adivsor or within your lab so you can demonstrate versatility. And that you should also aim for 1st or 2nd authorship... but does anyone know if sole authorship is becoming a thing now to get hired? Has anyone heard of this before?

 

It seems like a REALLY hard thing (logistically) for a student to do, unless if a program negotiates to 'fix' authorship with unacknowledged ghostwriters.

 

I have a colleague* who has been interviewing for R1 TT jobs who keeps getting told that he does not have enough independent teaching experience. From my perspective, this creates quite the conundrum: the R2s I interviewed with require oodles of independent teaching opportunities, while some R1s lack teaching/TA placements altogether (seriously). The more I learn about R1s vs. R2 and the politics of the job market, the less sense it makes

 

*I do not know if he has sole published work.

[spunky]

thankz peeps.

 

i think it is probably an area-specific thing because (although rare) i do find that most people into quant do have, at the very least, one or two solo publications. i guess since we don't have to go through the process of recruiting research participants or dealing with ethics committees and things like that (or even needing to interact with... you know, humans) it is expected that people in my area should be able to do research by themselves. 

 

oh well... i guess one more thing to add to the checklist *sigh*