When I was a graduate student, I wrote a few papers that only involved other graduate students; no faculty were involved in these papers, and therefore only students were authors and co-authors. We came up with the research ideas by talking with each other, did the work, wrote the manuscripts, revised them, and eventually saw them published.
Our various advisers were pleased that we did so, and some of us benefited from these adviserless publications in our job searches. In fact, one of my co-authors was specifically told by a professor at another university that these publications sans professors were impressive because they clearly demonstrated independence and initiative. And I was told during one job interview that these and other papers without my adviser showed that I had my own ideas.
In some fields and in some sub-disciplines, adviserless papers may be impossible or at least extremely rare. They are not so common in my field, actually, but my fellow grads and I were fortunate to have advisers who liked the fact that we pursued and published our own work. I was never supported by a grant from my adviser anyway, and I came up with my own idea for a PhD project, so I was rather unconstrained in terms of what I worked on.
At the time, I didn't think about whether these adviserless papers were unusual. Whether or not they were at the time, I think they are (even?) more rare now. I discussed this recently with one of these collaborators with whom I wrote a paper when we were both grad students. He thought it might be more rare today, and wondered why it might be more rare, if it even is. Our two main hypotheses are:
1. Science, even at the level of graduate research, has become more interdisciplinary and involves larger groups. Our grad collaboration groups were somewhat interdisciplinary (i.e., we all had different advisers), but not extremely so (i.e., we were working in related fields). Perhaps it is much less likely that a group of grad students can reasonably organize and conduct research as it is done today.
or:
2. The culture of graduate programs has changed. Just comparing grad programs with which my colleague and I are most familiar today with our old grad department, it is clear that there is a lot more active advising today. By active advising, I mean that many advisers are more closely involved in all stages of the research and therefore likely to have contributed ideas, writing, maybe even data (!) to a paper, and therefore will be a co-author. In my old grad department, it was a rather extreme example of sink-or-swim, live-or-die. We were pretty much just set loose, and those who survived were very independent (or learned to be). It was not a great system, but perhaps one outcome was that we produced some original work that did not involve our advisers.
Do I really have to say that I am not basing a major analysis of academic cultural trends on these anecdotes. Experience shows that I need to make this point, or some readers will be shocked shocked shocked at my unscientific musings. But that is merely what they are: musings.
And lest anyone think that we did these adviserless projects because we had no lives outside graduate school and therefore never left our labs and computers and had lots of time: that was only true for some of us. Others in these grad collaborations had families, hobbies, and other outside interests. My first grad collaboration was with an outstandingly smart, kind, and thoughtful older grad student who was married, worked 8-5, and was very into sports of all kinds. Although we had little in common other than our mutual scientific interests, we found ourselves frequently hanging out at lunchtime or in the afternoon, talking about Science, and eventually the ideas we kicked around turned into a paper in a high impact journal within our field.
There is one aspect of that anecdote that might be illuminating in terms of the general issue of whether/how grad collaborations occur, and it is related to the topic of (undergrad) student lounges discussed last week: we grad students had a place to hang out. We had abysmal office space, but there was a central area with a couch and a table and some chairs and a scary refrigerator, and a lot of Science was discussed in that place. There was also a subset of us who regularly went out for coffee and cookies together in the afternoon (in fact, I have published a paper with my most frequent afternoon cookie companion from grad school) or to a local pub (I have published with my pub companions as well, so you I guess you can say that I have pub pubs, and hence the strange title of this post). Because we had these other occasions at which Science was discussed at length, I don't think our grad lounge area was the key factor in nucleating grad collaborations. It was nevertheless a factor.
I would be happy if grad students in my department collaborated with each other and wrote papers. Some do, but it is rare. As an adviser paying a student from a grant, I would want to be aware of such independent student collaborations in case I needed to give any general advice about priorities or time in relation to the grant that was funding them, but overall I think that these grad collaborations should be encouraged. They are difficult things to foster because of course the whole point is that advisers not be involved, but perhaps we advisers who value such experiences can at least be supportive when such collaborations spontaneously generate.
14 years ago
42 comments:
"We had abysmal office space, but there was a central area with a couch and a table and some chairs and a scary refrigerator, and a lot of Science was discussed in that place. There was also a subset of us who regularly went out for coffee and cookies together in the afternoon (in fact, I have published a paper with my most frequent afternoon cookie companion from grad school) or to a local pub"
How do you create this culture? -- I would LOVE to see this happen more in our department (my grad experience also wasn't like this). Is it student or faculty driven? Both?
when I was a grad student (some 10 years ago) and collaborated with other grad students and published the results, our advisors were not involved but we HAD to make them co-authors by virtue of the fact that they owned the lab and equipment and paid our salaries. My advisor had even explained it to me in such black and white terms: he is the reason I even existed (as far as in the lab I mean), regardless of him not being involved in my research. If he didn't provide me with the lab access and money to buy supplies, none of my research would have been possible therefore he is a co-author. In my field (electrical engineering) I have NEVER seen a grad student or postdoc publish without their advisors' name as a co-author regardless of how little the advisor was involved in the work. Not even if they were supported by their own fellowship and not being paid by the professor's grant. (the fellowship doesn't buy you lab space or equipment for example.) to do so is considered a professional sin or unofficial breach of contract and will get you kicked out of your lab and department.
This is completely discouraged in the departments I've been in. Students are paid to do work for their advisors and are doing their thesis work on their own time. As it is, there is not enough time to do everything expected. A paper would take resources (who is going to pay for them?) and time (who can offer any of that?). In addition, if you published a paper without your advisor during your dissertation, others will assume it's because you and your advisor had a falling out and you had no other choice.
Maybe the difference is because of lab- and field- based science where fancy machines and materials are needed?
I have NEVER heard of a grad student publishing without their advisor as a co-author. Is this something that would tend to happen in a computational/theoretical field?
I have always been under the impression that if you are doing lab work and using reagents and materials that your advisor has purchased through their grants, you are obliged to have them as the last author on your paper. That is definitely the thought in my field anyway
Wonderful post. Definitely, advisor-less all-student papers show independence in a way that other papers, no matter how good, cannot. I wrote one such paper years ago when doing my PhD, and remember being quite thrilled with it. In my then dept, this was totally against the culture, and I did not sufficiently appreciate then the wisdom of my advisor in letting me free to do this. Now I am in a dept with a faculty-gradstudent ratio of 1:3, and my proudest moments with respect to students I have advised is when they collaborated amongst themselves and published something independently. It augurs well for their future careers. As you said, I did give them feedback and criticism, which hopefully helped them, without becoming a co-author. That's part of an advisor's job.
MM
Being in biomedical science, truly advisor-less pubs are rare, due to the world of funding, but I love the idea of science happening because of students talking to one another. One of my current postdocs illustrates this. He is an outstanding scientist in every way--key is the combination of great bench skills and truly remarkable networking abilities. When he got here he already knew every PI in his field, and he rapidly met everyone in our building.
As a student, this played out in a very interesting project that married his skills in cell biology with another student's skills in virology, resulting in two high profile co-authored papers (these had the other students advisor as an author because they paid for the work and likely contributed in other ways as well). As a postdoc, this played out in a collaboration with the lab downstairs that already resulted in two high profile co-authored papers. I addition, he has literally helped a dozen other folks and if one could list acknowledgments or important contributions, he'd need to add a page to his CV.
The new building that's going up next door for our Department is open lab format and is built to encourage these conversations. I look forward to the work it will stimulate.
Mark P
One question: who pays for the supplies and equipment for advisorless research?
It's one thing if these are largely theoretical/computational papers. It's something else entirely if there are chemicals and instrument time involved.
We funded ourselves with small grants; other aspects of the research were either theoretical or involved using shared departmental facilities that did not require fees to a particular project.
Just being an adviser and paying someone an RA is not sufficient reason to justify the adviser as automatic co-author if there was no intellectual input in a particular paper. This is not my opinion; it is standard information provided during basic research ethics training.
I have a 3rd hypothesis: students tend to become professors at institutions that are not as "good" as the ones they did their PhDs in. Students at lower-ranked institutions tend to be less independent, and therefore less likely to publish separately from their advisor. From the advisor's perspective, it will look like a trend over time, but it's really a trend over institution ranking.
I have no idea if that fits your experience, but it certainly fits mine. I was a grad student only two years ago, and me and my friends had quite a few papers without our advisors. Now I'm a professor at an institution 30-40 ranks down, and it's much, much less common here. And I don't think it's that the professors at my current institution would object to that.
BTW, I am in a computational field, which may indeed be why I was able to publish without my advisor as much as I did.
"How do you create this culture? -- I would LOVE to see this happen more in our department"
That's what I would like to know too. We do have facilities - a common kitchen where everyone (grad students, postdocs, faculty) have daily coffee breaks and eat lunch together - but this does not seem to be enough. The culture here is that you should not talk about work during socialising, so all we hear about is weather, football, politics or whatever. If you try to bring up something about research, you are frowned upon and the topic is quickly changed back to whatever small talk topic people decide to discuss. It's a pity in my opinion. I wonder if it can be changed.
In my department (biology, everyone with large field components to their research), this is encouraged and not unusual. In fact, people will sometimes publish their dissertation work without their advisor (as single-author papers), and this is not because they've had a falling out, just because it's our work, not our advisors'. I'm working on one such paper myself at the moment. How was it funded? Well, out of our own pockets, but that included gas money and about $20 for some PVC to build our equipment.
Some days I wish my work was eligible for the kind of money that comes with NIH funding, and then things like this come up -- the freedom we have to do our own thing when there's so little money to be had is really amazing.
As for the culture -- the project that I'm doing with another student was actually conceived at a party. For whatever reason, nerdiness is strongly encouraged among the grad students, and it's almost impossible to even go to the bar without discussing science.
I have had people ask why my postdoc adviser was not on some minor thing - abstract, poster whatever. The implication being that the adviser maybe didn't want to be associated with the work. I could use some advice on how to say that this is my own work without making it sound snarky re adviser, who is fabulous to let me publish alone! They don't seem to first consider that I'm an independent thinker. Then they give unsolicited advice about the need to show independence!
It is less common in the biosciences, and usually rightfully so; although my grand-adviser insisted that his grad students publish their PhD work as a solo author. They sometimes complained that it was harder to publish without the name of the bigwig adviser, but perhaps that was part of the point!
I've seen the convention in my field shift -- in my grad advisor's day, it was plausible, and accepted that one's "thesis project" would be a independent publication, the culmination of the training, that allowed you to go it on your own. My thesis project also would have qualified as such, and my adviser asked me if I'd like to publish it on my own. I said no -- because by that time, it was clear to me that the interpretation of an "independent" publication would not have been independent work, but as a "falling out."
There were some cases in my generation (phd in the 90's) where grad students published alone, but these were unique cases -- for example, a situation where the adviser basically left the lab, but was funded, say through the end of a grant cycle, and waited to close his lab down officially.
"Just being an adviser and paying someone an RA is not sufficient reason to justify the adviser as automatic co-author if there was no intellectual input in a particular paper. This is not my opinion; it is standard information provided during basic research ethics training."
Absolutely! I've read far too many papers where "courtesy" authors were included who had no intellectual contribution. Financial contribution does *not* suffice for co-authorship!
I'm not in science, but my fellow grad students and I rarely talk about our discipline in general, although if we often discuss the classes we are taking, whether we are in the same classes or not. My discipline is so diverse that students in different areas often only have cursory knowledge of other areas, so I think that is part of it, but I think it is also that our university is located in a relatively remote suburb in a particularly beautiful and fun city, so a lot of grad students live closer to the city center and hence only spend time on campus to attend classes and TA. Since our discipline doesn't require fancy equipment or labs, it can be done from almost anywhere, so there is no real "grad culture" around the department. We mostly see each other in the hallway where our offices are, the grad computer room, or occasionally in the lounge (which is mostly taken over with undergrads). Oh, and as might be expected, single-author publications are absolutely the norm in my discipline--only occasionally would be there be dual-author papers or books, and those are almost always between two senior academics or interdisciplinary, never between an advisor and grad student. (It is also the norm in my discipline to publish only one paper or nothing at all before receiving the PhD).
I'd argue that it is the arrangement of offices, not the lounge, that fosters the collaborations. Physical proximity for immediate access, and being able to engage discussions without disrupting others allow for productive collaborations.
This applies to faculty as well as fellow student collaborators. Of course, attitudes and norms of the discipline also matter.
Talking over plots, journal articles, and even the databases and matlab code it takes to tweak parameters is when the concrete progress is made.
I realize it is a common mythology that progress often germinates in lounges and saloons, however, in my experience, that mainly applies to conferences where a retreat is necessary to maintain a sustained discussion.
I teach research ethics sometimes, and I think I'll use this post and comments for class discussion -- it illustrates really well the different intuitions we can have about cases like this. In the dept. where I teach this class, the science profs have the view that a co-author is co-responsible for the intellectual content of the paper. With the authorship comes the burden of vouching for the paper, and people in that department seem to think all authors should bear some of the responsibility (perhaps only a small amount) if the data end up being fabricated or something. But, obviously, this isn't a universally held view.
If you publish some papers with your adviser and some without, and your adviser writes positive recommendation letters for you, there should be no question of a "falling out" just because the adviser is not an author on some papers.
Re advisor authorship, which I forgot in my first post:
It does help the advisor to have his/her name on the papers claimed to result from grants. Personally, I don't see a significant downside of adding the advisor as an author on any paper. First author gets primary credit in any case.
The general tendency in my group is to offer many co-authorship early in the writing, and trust people to decide for themselves whether they have contributed and will help write the manuscript.
Advisors sometimes resist being added if it would commit them to doing more work, as well as if they don't feel they've contributed and have scruples or just plain don't like the results.
PIs can list a paper on grant reports even if the PI is not a co-author.
This is very interesting from where I sit. I submitted a singly authored paper as a grad student. It was rejected, and I never resubmitted it. I believed the referee's critique. I later published a joint paper with my advisor, since I had found and corrected a fundamental error in a paper he was submitting. The journal backlogs were so long in those days that the paper did not appear until three years after I graduated.
After describing this experience to some colleagues later, I found that some were horrified. It seems that at least in the 1960's, (and maybe still today, I don't know) some Mathematics departments considered it unethical for an advisor to co-author a paper with an advisee until after the student had finished a dissertation. I worried about this enough that I once refrained from discussing an idea not directly related to a student's dissertation with her. We published it jointly after she finished the Ph. D. It has always seemed to me that the exploitation of students was a real possibility here; I knew one student who spent 19 years as a grad student because of such a situation.
just to respond to FSP's point.
Yes, the advisor can claim papers without their name on reports, but PIs routinely claim credit for any project that is not chained to something else when it come time to write reports, usually written as fast as possible.
To the extent anyone reads the reports, and the readers are sentient but not experts in the field, a slew of papers with the PI's name is more compelling than somewhat independent and unrelated papers without the PI's name.
The same goes for compilations of results from prior support in proposals. The difficulty is that one rarely has confidence much support for that student came from that grant, even if one likes to see work other than that proposed offered as an accomplishment.
other aspects of the research were either theoretical or involved using shared departmental facilities that did not require fees to a particular project.
Right. But some departments don't allow this. I've been in departments where every single sample run on, for instance, the NMR or TEM had to be charged to someone's grant to help offset the costs of the maintenance and consumables.
Could such a department set aside special funds to allow grad-student-only research? Yes. They could even levy a $5-$10 per sample "tax" against the other users to pay for it. But in an an environment of dwindling budgets, I would pity the person who pitched this at a faculty meeting, especially if they were untenured.
I've pitched the pay-if-you-can, don't-if-you-can't idea for this very reason -- to facilitate exploration and research by students. Once I was successful and once the best I could do was negotiate an extremely low rate for off-peak hour use.
In my area of life science it's pretty common to publish without your advisor. Most of my papers (5 out 8) from my dissertation were single authored but we've had a few since then that were joint. My advisor provided some of the funding in terms of equipment but I self funded with small grants a great deal of the work (my field is not a really high cost one). When I suggested though that he might be an author because of the financial support but even more because of his intellectual contributions in helping me shape and refine my ideas, his answer was "that's my job". There should be more like him.
I work on the border between molecular biology (where advisorless pubs are practically never seen) and whole organism biology (where single author and adviserless papers are common). So there's a mixture of both types of pubs in my field.
The molecular folks also tend to be more inclusive, adding almost anybody who has contributed any amount of work (or none :p) to the author list, whereas organismal bio is a lot more restrictive (you have to do a LOT to be on the author list, and providing lab space doesn't cut it).
What a fantastic opportunity! I'm so glad you were able to do that (and very very jealous)
I think it doesn't happen much in my field in part because advisors do not "permit" their students to be involved in other research projects. Or can make it so difficult for you to be involved in other projects, that no one does it. I think it's great though!
I think that the way we measure accomplishment has also changed over time. When I was in grad school, almost 30 years ago, it was not uncommon for students to write papers by themselves. In fact, I published a paper as single author out of my PhD work (I also published with my advisor), and I believe this is what gave me a tenure-track job. But today, advisors (like everyone) are so concerned/obsessed about citation index and other measuring sticks that I am afraid the days of freelance graduate research and independent publications are mostly over, at least in my field. I should say that several of my graduate students published papers without me as an author, which I strongly encouraged. As an aside, FSP, it may be interesting to conduct a poll with your audience about the frequency with which people check their citations, if such a poll does not exist.
Great idea! Poll coming tomorrow.
In mathematics, it is still a fairly common practice for advisors to leave their names off their advisees papers even if they have made some intellectual contribution to it, especially if the intellectual contribution only consists of suggesting the problem and providing general direction.
Collaborations among students or between students and postdocs is very common. Occasionally it even happens that a student is effectively (though not officially) advised by a postdoc.
The convention is for authors to be listed alphabetically on papers. I believe part of what makes this convention work is that one must make a fairly substantial contribution to be considered a co-author. There exists a paper for which I contributed the crucial idea behind one of the sections in several conversations but am rightly not considered a coauthor (though I expect to be acknowledged).
In my field, I don't know of any examples where students publish without their advisers. In my grad program, students were encouraged to work "results-driven" hours, which meant the freedom to choose how a break may be spent: coffee-going and lunch-chatting breaks could actually be extremely useful in developing collaborations. As a postdoc, however, the lab culture I joined was one where the adviser would literally throw a tantrum if his lab members were not eating at their desks in 20 min or less, also reading papers at the same time, not "allowed" to talk to one another in the group office so as not to hinder productivity. "Goofing off" (even talking Science) was definitely frowned upon...and, frankly, the lack of creativity and progress of research in the lab was not nearly where it should have been had students been given a chance to grow a little...at least, that's my opinion.
I'm in experimental physics.
I'm pretty sure my advisor's feeling would be hurt if i tried to publish without him.
I think it would be much better politics to work independently and then let him in during the m/s writing process (which is what has happened for my last 3-4 papers). In fact, in almost every instance it has made for a better paper too, and it would be dumb to not let him in just because "it looks good" or boosts my self-esteem.
Hah, this is hilarious! In Theoretical Physics we are supposedly 'encouraged' to be independent thinkers, but it is rare for a student to publish without an advisor, and certainly not papers about independent ideas. Authors are listed alphabetically, so people tend to judge someone's contribution to a paper by their reputation. Solo author papers are therefore the way to go, but this is often frowned upon at both the student and postdoc levels, for the unethical reasons of flashy grant reports etc.
Great timing! I just had this conversation with one of my students yesterday. I contributed some to her paper, mostly by providing feedback. She got the money for the fieldwork (though she used my equipment). In part, my decision to suggest she be sole author was based on the fact that I would be the only other author on the paper. I would not have felt uncomfortable being listed if there were several other contributors as well but adding my name in this case seemed to diminish the perception of her role more than appropriate. As someone else here said, what I did was just my job as her advisor.
In mathematics, it is widely assumed that an advisor has contributed to any paper written by a student (while they were a student), even if in most cases the advisor does not put his or her name on it. This is especially the case for solo papers.
What an interesting idea. My understanding of graduate school in my department is that graduate students (and post doc) are there to function as the data-generating arms of the advisor, and as such come under the advisor's umbrella in all things. Sort of like a serf-dom. I am 95% certain that my advisor would be offended and might dismiss me from the lab if I did such a thing without his knowledge, and he wouldn't support it if he did know about it. Although I'm in collaborations with other labs, my research is *highly* directed by my advisor and he would be on any publications.
I'm with Tracy. In my field anyway, science is expensive, funding is scarce, and it's a rare advisor that doesn't have some intellectual input on what their students are doing. I'm not qualified to comment on whether it's a good system or if authorship lists are getting inflated though.
That said, in the case of fields where it is common (or at least not unheard of) for trainees to publish solo or with other trainees only, is there any mechanism for getting the list of publications from a research group? Do people just keep their websites up to date, or is it just not important to have that list outside of formal reviews?
I ask because I frequently pubmed PIs to see what their lab is up to. For example if a person I don't know is scheduled to talk at a meeting. But then I'm very nosy, and I don't know my field very well yet.
In my old lab, I was in a fairly large group and our advisor facilitated and encouraged us to work together on projects and to be independent. A lot of us came up with paper ideas and worked together on them. I suppose that if I had broached the subject with my advisor, he would have been okay with not being a co-author (he was a full professor and didn't have to worry about regular reviews), but I (we) always wanted his input on our papers and felt that his input was a critical part of the paper writing process, thus he deserved co-authorship (although he never minded being put last). I would have felt bad not putting him on there. Perhaps this was just a function of my anxiety about submitting a publication without some feedback.
In the group I'm in now, I could never see it happening (or with other groups in my department). Some advisors make it very clear that they own your time and your research happens because of them, as well. If you're not in the lab, you're wasting their money. Since there is a more regular review process for the professors, I can understand why they'd be upset if you published without them, especially if they're up for tenure. But it sure stifles the willingness of the other students to collaborate on research ideas, even if we had the time (which most of us don't).
I can't imagine any advisors (in my field at least) ever being OK with not being a co-author on their students' papers regardless of how little they contributed. In grad school in fact, my advisor rorced me to add at least THREE honorary co-authors to ALL of my papers, these are profs who did jack squat, had no clue what I was doing cos they weren't interested, and weren't even interested in reading the drafts of the manuscripts bearing their names either. The only time they showed any interest in my papers (where they were co authors) is whenever they were updating their CVs and wanted me to give them the citations of all my papers that included their names. These were senior tenured profs too. I guess having 500 publications on their CVs doesn't mean a damn thing if half or more of them were obtained this way.
I am a post-doc in bioengineering. In my lab the PI demands to be last author on all my papers because his grants pay for my salary. I have pointed out how this is clearly in violation of the codes of ethics, and even the "guidelines for authorship" of the journals where we publish. But the answer has been "If you want to publish on your own, get your own funding". He even demands to be corresponding author. This means we have had long sessions where I have had to explain to him why the project went a given way, and why I chose such and such method. In summary I am tutoring him so that he can discuss a paper which has my ideas, my work and which I wrote. At best he changed a few words in the final manuscript, but only because he would have fired me if I had submitted without his clearance. Is this an ethical violation? of course!, but I either take it or loose the job. Otherwise this institution is a great place to work, with great collaborators.
When I realized this was going to be the case, after about six months into the post-doc, I decided to start separate lines of research of which the PI was not aware. I did the research at home in a computer I bought with software I paid for. I worked weekends and evenings, and ended up paying for the publication costs from my own pocket. I only told the PI when the paper was ready to submit. It was on something he does not do, and will never do because he does not like (understand?). The PI was mad, and told me that this may be the end of my career. He advised me not to send it. It turns out that the paper has been welcomed by the community, and now he advertises this as proof that he is "open minded and really promotes an atmosphere of freedom". When trying to convince people to come work for him he uses me as an example of the freedom we all enjoy.
I will soon take a faculty position. During the interview process I was told that one of the things that they noticed is that I had published on my own. I was so glad. These papers had cost me so many evenings and weekends, and about $6000 of my own money.
In economics though there is much more coauthorship than in some social sciences and the humanities apparently advisor coauthored papers are treated skeptically. I did both myself and with my students. In the end it was a question of how much effort went in. If the advisor did some of the computation etc. and/or came up with key ideas, and spent a lot of effort on writing it is a coauthored paper and if it is just directing the process it is a single author student paper.
Well, good luck bringing your deparent up a few notches by encouraging advisor less collaborations!
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