Allocating the Credit in Collaborative Research

Abstract

For years journal articles from the natural sciences have been characterized by multiple authors, reflecting the collaborative nature of the research. The articles have also conformed to a professional norm in giving credit to the authors and, at least implicitly, indicating their relative contributions. Although such collaborative research has grown significantly in political science, the discipline is still wrestling with any standard to indicate who gets credit and the nature of multiple authors' relative contributions. This is an issue with which political scientists from the most junior to the most senior continue to deal.

Collective credit allocation in science

“…The lack of a robust credit allocation system that can account for the discrepancy between researchers' contribution to a particular body of work and the credit they obtain, has prompted some to state that "multiple authorship endangers the author credit system" (7). This situation is particularly acute in multidisciplinary research (8,9), when communities with different credit allocation traditions collaborate (10). Furthermore, a detailed understanding of the rules underlying credit allocation is crucial for an accurate assessment of each researcher's scientific impact, affecting hiring, funding, and promotion decisions.…”

Who SoTLs Where? Publishing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Political Science

“…Clearly, collaboration is more typical of SoTL research than of non-SoTL research. Overall, compared to non-SoTL articles, the trend towards co-authorship of SoTL articles is much closer to that of publication in major political science journals in other subfields, where 40% were co-authored in the decade between 1996 and 2005 (Kanchan et al 2006, 2), roughly equivalent to the timeframe of our database; among APSA journals, collaborative articles comprised 60% of all articles between 1997 and 2007 (Biggs 2008, 246) 8 . Maybe it is because most college classes are taught by a single professor that articles reporting on teaching experiences and techniques tend to be single authored, whereas the research aspect of SoTL work lends itself to collaboration.…”

Data Collection and Collaboration

“…As a result, the committee decided to put together the following symposium on issues related to data archiving and authorship in an attempt to provide some background, and to begin a discussion amongst the wider discipline about some of the associated broader professional issues involving authorship and collaboration. It is our hope that we can build on previous work and reports on related topics written by Biggs (2008) and the American Political Science Association's Working Group on Collaboration (Chandra et al 2006).…”