On getting credit for One's Students' Publications

One by-product of the publishing arm's race (recall this post and the discussion at Dailynous) that the role of graduate educators (supervisors and others) is increasingly geared toward making sure that their students publish during their doctorates. This has been facilitated by the ongoing trend toward the 'PhD as a number of collected articles.'  These trends are magnified in Flanders, where I work; our grant agency is oriented toward rewarding publications. The rule of thumb right now is that you won't even be considered (!) for a post-doc without at least four refereed journal articles. In effect, this encourages graduate supervisors to act as lab-heads (obtain grants and all that) and also to hire post-docs, in part, to help professionalize graduate students on a day-to-day basis.

One way to acquire the skill of writing a journal article is to work with somebody who knows how to do it.* Some of my colleagues work extremely closely with their students; it is time-consuming and also -- depending on the circumstances -- not always the most rewarding work, especially if one reads and re-reads as well as re-writes many multiple drafts of the same paper. Not surprisingly, although not always without some tension, graduate supervisors put their names, too, on the final publication. Predictably, this is not always a happy outcome; in some cases the student is a glorified research-assistant; it's not clear that such graduate students really learn to become independent thinkers and develop their own philosophical voice. In other cases the supervisor is a powerful free-rider exploiting their status; when the ability to obtain research-leave or research grants is tied to research-output this is a predictable outcome. (To be clear: on the whole I avoid publishing with my own PhD students, although I have published with other people's graduate students.) Human nature being what it is, one is always likely to overestimate one's own contribution to the final publication-outcome in a supervisor-graduate student relationship.

Of course, having only co-authored papers is still, I suspect, a mark against you in hiring decisions in much of professional philosophy even though it shows skill at team-work, developing professional relationships, and acquiring that most valuable resource -- an other person's philosophical time. So, in addition to avoiding free-riding, it's not always an optimal option to reward the supervisors's role in publication by adding their names to the byline. There are, however, other ways to reward their roles, including (but not limited to) tenure and promotion or generous acknowledgment in the first footnote. For example, at my university, supervisors and co-supervisors get extra, generous credits to their research accounts for some of the publications of their students at successful completion of the PhD.  In fact, the supervisor can choose to share this credit with others who contributed to the effort.

 

*This post was promted even encouraged by facebook discussion with Michael Weisberg; the usual caveats apply.

Comments

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Eric: Thank you for this. It's a difficult balancing exercise, I agree. It is exacerbated by the fact that the grant model in Belgium is too much modeled on the sciences. When my sister did her PhD in medium-energy nuclear physics, her lab director's name was on all her publications, although his contribution was usually not creative (he did of course check the work of his PhD students, and actively mentored them in how to present their research using the practices of the profession, and where to submit to etc). Other lab members who had little creative input, but, for instance, just ran some analyses, were also on her first-authored papers. However, in physics, it is generally understood that this is how it works. The first author gets the credit, but there is an understanding that this is the result of teamwork. So it is totally unproblematic in physics to have all your papers co-authored with your lab colleagues and promotor.
The problem is that this model cannot be emulated in the humanities. As you know, I like to co-author and have co-authored a lot [although never with my advisor] but I think the situation of a humanities PhD who has nothing but co-authored articles with his or her advisor is undesirable. I once heard an advisor say to his PhD student that she should write more papers with him, because that way he could write grants at which she could be employed, he would need to make a case for why he was writing this project (she wasn't eligible for one of the personal postdoc grants anymore). But this makes it more difficult for the former student to find employment elsewhere and makes her too dependent on the goodwill and ability of her former advisor to win funding. She will not be perceived as someone who has her own philosophical voice, regardless of her own contribution.
One problem - specific for Flemish academia - is that professors can't have course release based on their grants. I've found this situation incomprehensible: how can you do enough work on the grant without course release? In such a situation, putting one's name under papers where one's contribution is perhaps not as big as to merit co-authorship becomes the way to get enough publications on one's CV, which is necessary to win new grants. So one could counter the situation by providing profs with course release so they can work more on their own research, perhaps also by putting some more weight on their first-authored publications than on those in which they are not first author (which presumably are a better measure of their output, for in stance in the social sciences, where almost everything is co-authored).