Senior colleague asking to be second author - reasonable or not?

[Booksandmorebooks]

Hi. I was wondering if I could ask your collective opinion about a situation I have come up against at work (social sciences). As per title, a senior colleague in my department who has been mentoring me asked that I include them as second author on a recently completed paper. It took me unawares and I said yes and submitted the paper with his name on too. However, I am now feeling like I should have said no.

For background, he has been mentoring me for 12 months as part of a faculty scheme i.e. he gets some hours on his timetable for supporting me and this has been working really well. We talked about my ideas before I started writing. He read a finished draft of the paper and suggested a couple of (very helpful) signposting improvements. He has been very supportive but more in a cheerleading than intellectual capacity IYSWIM! That is, he hasn’t written any part of the paper, contributed to the structure or theoretical framework, and hasn’t read more than a couple of the papers cited as this is not his area. Does this level of contribution merit second author status? It is much less involvement that I have had from previous collaborators but maybe I have just been lucky in the past! Or is he being a bit cheeky? Either way, how might I have handled this better? Should we have discussed this upfront? And/or could I have declined his request without causing some kind of fallout?

I have been really pleased with the mentoring arrangement but I am not happy that it has taken this rather instrumental turn. However, perhaps that is the point of these kinds of initiatives and I should stop being precious about it! So all ideas welcome, thank you!

It’s too late now. You already submitted the paper. Next time don’t roll over so easily. He should never have gotten 2nd author status.

What you have described sounds reasonable to me, but interested to know what others think!

Most second authors haven't actually written anything, but do as this situation.

How many authors are there?

I write papers for a living, but am not an author. IME you can become an author just by reading all prepared drafts and saying "No further comment" at each review stage, sadly! That is taking the piss a bit though. At least your guy has made constructive comments!

Should have said: I am not listed as an author on anything I write.

How many authors in total? Or is it just the two of you?
In any case, I agree is too late now

sorry for derailing @ContessaHallelujahSparklehorse - if you don't mind me asking, what exactly do you do, and in which area?

Seems fine to me. If you weren't planning on including him as an author, it was incredibly cheeky of you to have him read over your draft. What do you lose by having him as an author on the paper? Absolutely nothing.

Seems fine to me - they've put time and effort into helping you at your request and actually single author papers can look a bit weird on a cv in sciences as looks like you are unwilling to acknowledge other people's contributions. It may well be timetabled hours but it is hours they have lost from time writing their own papers. I learnt a long time ago not to be to generous with my time as a lot of people are incredibly grateful while you are helping them but then don't include you on their papers despite you helping them get to that point. Papers are how we are measured when it comes to career progression and funding.

Hi folks. Thanks for all the different perspectives - really helpful. In my field it is perfectly normal to have sole authorship. I agree in principle, it doesn't matter that someone else's name appears on the paper as well but my institution has form for passing papers along to second or third authors for REF purposes, so this could have real consequences for me. Hence why I am concerned, especially given the way that my colleague has gone about this.

Buckett - I hear you. However, I was recruited into a mentorship arrangement on pain of losing a significant chunk of my research time if I declined. He has been given a generous number of hours (e.g. more than we get for second supervising a PhD student). I hadn't assumed he would read drafts of my work but he asked me to send him a copy when I had already finished.

Judging by what some of you have said, I think I'm lucky this is the first time this has happened to me. I now realise I should not have given him sight of my paper & just kept our meetings to the bare minimum - while his contribution to the paper and the thinking behind it was minimal, he has been very helpful on the generalities of what I should be doing career-wise etc.

So I will use this as an important lesson that we are in a competitive environment & all I have is my work so it should stay in my head (& that of any freely-chosen co-authors!) until it is safely in the hands of the journal editor! Thanks again everyone - really useful discussion!

As the others have said, it is too late this time as you've already submitted, but I thought I'd add a comment in case this situation arises again. I'm also social sciences, and my experience is that unless someone has actually made a contribution to writing the paper, they don't (and shouldn't!) get listed as an author.

So, as a supervisor or mentor I wouldn't expect to be named as an author on anything published by a student or junior colleague unless it was a genuinely shared piece of work. Talking over ideas, reading a draft and making some small suggestions does not constitute an authorial contribution in my view and is the kind of supportive mentoring that more senior colleagues should do to help junior colleagues get started with developing their own publication profile.

This doesn't mean that people won't try and persuade you to add them anyway though!

And yes, I know this differs across disciplines and collaborative multi author papers are very much the norm in some.

Have PM'd you, Porcupine :)

I am really interested in these responses. I am a senior lecturer and have just asked a professor if she will look at a paper for me and provide comments. I hadn't thought of asking if she wanted her name on the paper as a result. If she made very substantive comments and amendments then of course I would think that would be fine. But normally I would think of this as simply supportive work senior colleagues can do for those coming up behind. If I did the same for someone else, I certainly would not expect to have my name on their paper unless I had contributed something really substantially to the conceptual framework or something like that. Interesting.

Sorry - typos and terrible grammar in the post above (no wonder I never get published)!

I don't this is right. I work with both social and 'hard' sciences and I wouldn't expect this in either. Yes, in the latter it's not uncommon to have long lists of authors (and increasingly journals require notes against each name to indicate their contribution), but in my experience everyone listed has been involved in the underlying research reported in the paper.

Like oggyizzy, I read loads of papers for colleagues as well as students and wouldn't dream of expecting this.

You've reminded me of an instance a few years ago when a colleague added her name as (first) author to a report I'd written as she'd transcribed the discussion that underpinned it. Reader, I removed her.

I suppose the only consolation is that the co-author might make your paper looked at by the editor if they're a known name.

It's fascinating how much this varies - my field (humanities) doesn't regularly go in for co-authoring, but we all read work for one another all the time. In particular, more senior figures offer it (and are thought bad for not offering!) as part of support for more junior colleagues. There is absolutely no expectation that they would then appear as a co-author, even if they offered quite hefty rewriting suggestions! (Generally, however, the feedback they would offer would be closer to 'not this' or 'expand this' rather than 'write 'xxxx' instead' - so even with feedback they're not actually doing any of the writing themselves.

Even without the discipline-specific context, however, I think the fact that mentoring you is part of a formal scheme, for which he is getting workload compensation, means that he even more certainly should not have expected to become second-author - he is being paid to mentor/help you - and if some of that time is spent reading drafts, then he is already being compensated for that!

I am in the Social Sciences and, although we are not Sociologists, we refer to the guidelines of the BSA as they are fairly clear and accessible. They say that someone listed as an author must have contributed to at least two of: designing or conceptualising the research; collecting data; analysing data; writing the paper. They should have reviewed drafts of the paper and agreed the final version and they should be able to defend the paper as a whole.

www.britsoc.co.uk/publications/guidelines-reports/authorship-guidelines/

In practice we would include conceptualising the paper under the design/conceptualisation heading as we work a lot with secondary data.

Wow, that does seem to cheeky to me! In my field ('hard' sciences) we are advised strongly to get colleagues to read papers and there is a even a committee that will give you feedback. No one expects those people to be authors on it! If someone helps substantially, I have included them the acknowledgements ("we thank so-and-so for helpful feedback in developing the manuscript" or similar).

I wonder if, were something like this to happen again, that could be a potential sop - offer a place in the acknowledgements? Although I must say I'd have no idea how to do this in any particularly polite way. Very unfortunate that he was your mentor - as going to ask a mentor about such a request would be my first suggestion!

Humble PhD here, but that sounds very strange. Surely the point of acknowledgements is to thank people who have read drafts and made suggestions? I'm surprised some people have said this is normal.

The BSA guidelines look good to me.

I would not allow authorship in this situation- and you know that for next time now.

I do go as second/third author though in situations where the student or research group needs my input- and I'd expect to be rewriting/putting in extensive feedback, reanalysing and so on for that. I also read papers for friends/colleagues and give feedback for free/no authorship but I wouldn't be rewriting in that situation.

Lots of people do far less though, especially if it's on a funded project with lots of PI's all of whom expect their names to be on everything.

I have decades of experience though am not in a senior role.

The tradition is to be generous in offering authorship but modest in accepting it. So lots of offers & plenty declines. My boss is in his 60s & takes similar view.

That said, I was told informally that in our dept. even reading a paper was enough to expect authorship (told this by someone else who also thought it was ridiculous). Patently not conforming with the usual authorship guidelines (that journals often remind us of). I don't find many people will decline authorship offer, in recent yrs.

I'm minded to put your mentor down as CF, OP, but in their defence, they may be following departmental guidelines. I wouldn't want this to ruin an otherwise good relationship.