Guidelines for Authorship Credit, Order, and Co-Inquirer Learning in Collaborative Faculty-Student SoTL Projects

Abstract

Determining authorship credit and order in collaborative research projects can be difficult, can introduce or increase conflict in the research environment, and can exacerbate existing inequalities and affect power dynamics between team members. As a result, much disciplinary scholarship has been written to develop potential guidelines for authorship credit and order. However, the collaborative interdisciplinary nature of much SoTL work, along with the increasing focus of SoTL on students as co-inquirers into SoTL research, creates unique issues and challenges in ethically assigning authorship credit on SoTL projects. Informed by seminal disciplinary papers on authorship issues and best practices in undergraduate research, this paper proposes a new model to identify the relative contributions of student collaborators and explicitly incorporate a process-focused approach to collaborative faculty-student SoTL projects.

Writing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Articles for Peer-Reviewed Journals

“…In other situations, especially where there is a large writing team, it can take longer to complete the work, as it involves more negotiation and editing to achieve a unified voice. Deciding on author order for multi-authored text can cause tensions, particularly if there are power relationships between the authors (Maurer, 2017), so it is best to discuss the principles by which authorship will be decided before starting to write and periodically revisit author order throughout the process.…”

Facilitating Student-Authored Papers in LIS Education Research: A Case Study from the LIS Classroom

“…All sixteen students in the class participated, all had final say on the content of the paper, and all agreed to publication in JELIS. Although publication was a final goal for the project, the process of the project and what is learned during that process should be the focus for both students and instructor (Mauer, 2017). Overall learning outcomes will vary based on the topic of the paper, but need to be evaluated independent of publication.…”

“…Deciding author order is one of the major ethical considerations for collaborate student research (Barretta-Herman & Garrett, 2000;Mauer, 2017). The class agreed to author order based on amount of work contributed, including the instructor.…”

Guiding Undergraduates Through the Process of First Authorship

“…Much has been written about the ethics of assigning authorship credit in the sciences and social sciences (see Maurer, 2017, for a review), and attempts have been made to fairly determine authorship order by (a) surveying past authors about their experiences (e.g., Wagner et al, 1994; Sandler and Russell, 2005; Moore and Griffin, 2006; Geelhoed et al, 2007), (b) assessing reactions to hypothetical authorship scenarios (e.g., Costa and Gatz, 1992; Bartle et al, 2000; Apgar and Congress, 2005), (c) proposing step-by-step decision-making models (Fine and Kurdek, 1993; Foster and Ray, 2012; Maurer, 2017), and (d) outlining quantitative systems that assign weighted points to tasks associated with publishing (e.g., Winston, 1985; Kosslyn, 2015). The consensus seems to be that writing the manuscript is either the most important factor in determining first authorship (e.g., Winston, 1985; Bartle et al, 2000; Apgar and Congress, 2005) or at least tied with idea origination as the most important factor (Wagner et al, 1994; Kosslyn, 2015).…”