The Authorship Determination Process in Student-Faculty Collaborative Research

Cultivating the development of new researchers is an essential role of counselor educators in doctoral degree programs. Mentoring through collaborative research is one method for helping doctoral students develop confidence and competence as researchers; however, determining the appropriate division of responsibility and recognition in collaborative research can be challenging. The challenge is exacerbated by the wide variety of authorship determination practices within counselor education and in other related disciplines. Ethical guidelines hold the faculty member responsible for ensuring accurate recognition but fall short of providing specific directions for doing so. This quantitative research study provides a description of current and best practices for the authorship determination process as revealed in the responses of 1,009 doctoral students and faculty in education-related disciplines at 36 research-intensive institutions. Participants also indicated their levels of comfort with various aspects of the process, which highlighted some of the unique complexities inherent in student-faculty collaborative research. On the basis of these data and a thorough review of the literature, practical recommendations for counselor educators and students are presented. Carnegie Foundation scholar Chris Golde (n.d.) stated that the Ph.D., at its heart, is a research degree. It signifies that the recipient is able to ask interesting and important questions, formulate appropriate strategies for investigating these questions, conduct investigations with a high degree of competence, analyze and evaluate the results of the investigations, and communicate the results to others to advance the field. (para. 4) Many doctoral education scholars have suggested mentoring as a method for cultivating the competencies described by Golde (e.g., Betz, 1997; Groomes, Leahy, Thielsen, Pi, & Matrone, 2007; Koro-Ljungberg & Hayes, 2006; Nelson & Neufelt, 1998; Okech, Astramovich, Johnson, Hoskins, & Rubel, 2006; Wester et el., 2009). In recent years, counselor educators have increased their focus on cultivating research competencies in doctoral students, as evidenced by revisions to the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) Standards and the formation of an Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) task force on research mentoring (Wester et el., 2009). The 2009 CACREP Standards include research as a new type of doctoral internship (Section III, Standard B), which entails supervised practice designing and facilitating a study, analyzing and disseminating results of a study, and/ or writing grant applications. In addition to a formal internship, doctoral students often engage in collaborative research with faculty as part of a graduate assistantship, an extension of a class project, or an extracurricular opportunity. Finally, all counselor education doctoral students collaborate to some degree with their advisers throughout the dissertation process. All of these types of collaborations are opportunities for faculty to mentor students through active engagement in each phase of the research process. Although such collaborative research can be a positive experience for both the student and the faculty member, it is also inherently complex. Determining an appropriate division of responsibilities and appropriate authorship of resultant works may be difficult (Apgar & Congress, 2005; Louis, Holdsworth, Anderson, & Campbell, 2008; Nguyen & Nguyen, 2006). The process is even more challenging in student-faculty collaborations, given the intrinsic power differential (Aguinis, Nesler, Quigley, Lee, & Tedeschi, 1996; Geelhoed, Phillips, Fischer, Shpungin, & Gong, 2007) and likelihood of dual relationships. Dual professional relationships are often inevitable between counselor educators and doctoral students (e. …