Negotiating Authorship for Doctoral Dissertation Publications: A Reply

In an editorial titled “Negotiating Authorship for Doctoral Dissertation Publications” published in the January 2009 issue of Qualitative Health Research, Janice Morse wrote, “[T]he only single-authored work from a dissertation should be the instance in which it was the student’s own work. The student would have had to identify a question, write the proposal, conduct the research, and write and defend the dissertation without the committee making any changes to the work. This is possible, and has happened, but it is not the norm” (Morse, 2009, p. 3). Morse added that she jointly writes articles with students in “the mandatory weeks after the student submits his or her dissertation to the committee prior to the defense,” and said that she now “usually handle[s] the correspondence regarding the article. ” My purpose in responding to this editorial is neither to endorse nor to decry the practices Morse described. It is to place the authorship questions Morse raised in the broader context of changing institutional and professional reward structures. I suggest that qualitative researchers have particular stakes in the debates that pressures for certain kinds of productivity are generating that are different from the ones Morse described. I agree with Morse that it is not the norm for doctoral students to produce a dissertation that could be said to be “the student’s own work. ” I would go further. The notion that anyone produces a piece of research on their own is a myth, whether the person in question is a doctoral student or a senior faculty member. In the case of students, advisors, committee members, reviewers of research grants and project proposals, students’ peers, writers whose ideas students engage with, and discussants and participants in conferences and seminars all contribute to students’ dissertation projects—sometimes in very profound ways. As Morse rightly pointed out, it is not the norm that students produce work that is unchanged by others’ critiques, comments, questions, and suggestions. It is also the case, however, that this has never been the norm. What has changed, at least in my view, is the need for advisors and committee members to obtain credit for these contributions in the form of authorship. This is because the activity categories of teaching, advising, and mentoring have been devalued to the point of being rendered invisible—of quite literally not counting. The literature, as well as everyday life in health professions schools, suggests that Morse’s views about authorship for doctoral dissertation publications are likely to reflect current attitudes and practices. In many schools of public health, for instance, dissertation advisors and committee members are listed as authors on students’ dissertation publications. This practice contributes to the now well-established trend in medical, public health, nursing, and social work journals of an increase over time in the number of authors per article and a decrease in the frequency of single-author publications (Borry, Schotsmans, & Dierickx, 2006; Davies, Langley, & Speert, 1996; Gelman & Gibelman, 1999; Kyvik, 2003; Levsky, Rosin, Coon, Enslow, & Miller, 2007; Shaban, 2007). At the beginning of the 20th century, 98% of the articles published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, later known as the New England Journal of Medicine, were published by single authors (Durack, 1978). A century later, solo authorship in flagship medical journals has “all but vanished” (Weeks, Wallace, & Kimberly, 2004, p. 1949). Concern over “author inflation” (Strasburger, 1985) is evident in article titles such as “How Many Neurosurgeons Does it Take to Write a Research Article? Authorship Proliferation in Neurosurgical Research” (King, 2000), or “Six Authors in Search of a Citation: Villains or Victims of the Vancouver Convention” (Epstein, 1993)? Journal editors have responded to the problem of author inflation by imposing limits on authorship or by asking the primary author to describe the contributions of coauthors. Weeks et al. (2004) found that editorial policies limiting authors to a specific number were the only strategies that worked to cap the number of authors per article, and that authorship levels increased as soon as these policies were rescinded. Different explanations have been offered for the authorship explosion. Some researchers claim that increasingly complex protocols and the use of large, networked research groups spanning multiple centers or sites mean that research has become a collective endeavor. In support of this view, group authorship has become more common. Approximately 3% of the articles published in top