Authorship tips

Maria Lahman is the Mentor in Residence for November, Academic Writing Month (AcWrMo.) She is a professor at The University of Northern Colorado in the Department of Applied Statistics and Research Methods, where she teaches qualitative research methods. She is the author of Writing and Representing Qualitative Research, and the relevant text, Ethics in Social Science Research: Becoming Culturally Responsive. Use the code SAGE30 for a discount when you order the books from SAGE.

Who is author of an article and how name order will occur sounds simple but unfortunately can devolve into political and ethical concerns. If the research was conducted as a solo endeavor or with co-researchers will guide the authorship order of a journal article. At times an additional author may be invited to work on submitting the manuscript for the expertise they bring. In the area of authorship order, consider who had the idea for the research and the contribution levels of the various co-authors, along with your discipline-specific guidelines.

No one has the automatic right to authorship, including course professors, committee members, and advisors. The issue of authorship may be contentious due to changing ways of thinking, cultural norms, and discipline expectations. Therefore, I want to be clear that in a contemporary Western setting, qualitative research authorship includes people who have worked on a manuscript after a course or defense is over. Before that, these essential people are merely doing their job—what the student has paid them to do. (See Sections 8.12 a, b, and c of the American Psychological Association Ethics Code and Section 15 of the American Education Research Association’s Code of Ethics for more guidance on ethical authorship: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx and http://www.aera.net/Portals/38/docs/About_AERA/CodeOfEthics.pdf, respectively.)

Before writing collaborative research, if you have not already done so, send an email to all the authors outlining the contribution expectations of the manuscript (who will do what) and author order. Note that the authorship order will change if the workload changes since this is often an organic process that cannot be fully anticipated. Keep a file of the initial email and the replies from the authors. Be sure the co-authors know that they need to alert you to communicate changes in their contact info. since the publication process can take a long time. You will also need the co-authors’ names as they wish them to be written, along with their degree level and current affiliation. Throughout the journal submission process, send all authors copies of the final submissions and letters to and from the editor. Ask them to save the copies and save your own copies in multiple places.

Example Agreement for Contribution to a Publication

Author order: Maria, Becky, Dannon (alpha by family name hereafter), Morgan, Kimberley, Michelle, Amber, Margaret, Kritika, Rowen, and Jennifer. Order is subject to change given your contributions.

Contributions: All contribute reflections on the process, permission to use self-portrait, and reflection on the manuscript.

Becky helps assemble the manuscript and edit it.

Dannon takes pictures of the collage process and final self-portraits.

Working title: Own Your Walls: Researcher Reflexive Self-Portraits

Working Abstract: As part of an advanced doctoral research course, members participated in an in-depth exploration of the methodology portraiture. In this article, the authors, course instructor, and ten students represent themselves as researchers through collage portraits and written reflexive responses. A brief review of portraiture, collage in research, and researcher reflexivity, along with relevant course experiences, is presented. Images of the collage process and resulting portraits are highlighted. A collage of a class emerges as issues of transparency in research, the role of the researcher and representation are explored.

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