Notices of the American Mathematical Society
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Dear Early Career
I had been working on a paper for some time, and a colleague gave me a few ideas and suggestions which have improved the paper quite a bit. Should I offer coauthorship?
—Confused author
Dear Confused author,
Firstly, congrats on the interesting developments in your research! Your question is delicate, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer, but I can say that in my experience being generous with offering coauthorship has been a good decision in the longer term. However, one should only do this when appropriate.Footnote1 Essentially my guideline is that if the results and their proofs would be present without the discussions with your colleague, and the discussions have streamlined the presentation, then including an acknowledgement might be more appropriate.Footnote2 However, if the discussions have led to significant changes to the main results or the structure of the mathematics, then it would be beneficial for you to have a conversation with the colleague as to whether they would like to be included in the paper as a coauthor. If you have been working on the paper for a while, this can be a difficult decision to arrive at, as you may feel like the effort level has not been equitable. It is beneficial to have colleagues who are generous with their ideas, and you do not know how much effort they have made in arriving at their suggestions, and so thinking in this manner can be not an accurate reflection of “work done.” In my experience, observations of colleagues which at the time felt like they came out of nothing, were, in fact, modifications of ideas they had attempted to execute in different contexts several times previously. Their observations were really the result of thousands of hours of work.
The AMS Ethics Guidelines, which broach coauthorship briefly, may be found here: https://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/policy-statements/sec-ethics.
Being generous with acknowledgments is a good policy. If someone has helped you with any technical aspect of the paper (be it mathematics, references, or typesetting), then acknowledging their assistance is important to show that you valued their contribution. Additionally, if you are giving a seminar talk and you arrive at a particular moment when someone’s guidance helped, you should feel free to give them a shout-out.
Assuming the observations can be separated from the text without disturbing the flow of the exposition, a common alternative is to keep the authorship of the paper as it is, but to include the observations in a coauthored appendix. This is particularly suitable if
- 1.
the conversations have led to applications of your main results that you did not envisage, but have not modified the primary results themselves, or
- 2.
if you need a modification of a “standard” technical tool from another area, and the colleague has helped you with this due to their expertise in that area.
Finally, I can also attest to the fact that if you offer an important tool for people to use in a paper, only to not be invited to be a coauthor, then you can be a bit weary of communicating with them going forward. Consequently, if you value the potential collaborative future with this colleague, then being generous with offering coauthorship at this stage can be hugely beneficial for you.
—Early Career editors
Have a question that you think would fit into our Dear Early Career column? Submit it to Taylor.2952@osu.edu or bjaye3@gatech.edu with the subject Early Career.