Co-author or Teacher?
Article Outline
- The Nature of Academic Work
- The Faculty-Student Relationship
- Guidelines for Authorship in Student-Faculty Collaborations
- Possible Remedies
- References
- Copyright
Students of nursing and other health care disciplines often conduct individual or group research, quality improvement, or clinical projects to meet course or degree requirements. Faculty members may require submission of the resulting project reports for potential publication in professional journals, especially for students in graduate programs. When student-authored manuscripts are submitted to the AORN Journal, we often see faculty members listed as co-authors. Is this practice appropriate? What ethical dilemmas may arise when faculty members collaborate with students on work that is worthy of publication? Two issues—the nature of academic work and the nature of the faculty-student relationship—form the basis of these dilemmas.
The Nature of Academic Work
In the academic world, publishing can produce great professional rewards. The sobering reality for a non-tenured faculty member is that the number of publications on his or her curriculum vitae at the time of tenure application may have enormous weight in that important decision, hence the well-known adage “publish or perish.”1, 2 In addition to producing original scholarship by conducting and publishing research, however, faculty members are expected to teach and advise students and to engage in appropriate professional service activities for the department, school, university, profession, and community.
Given these competing pressures for a faculty member's time, attention, and energy, it is tempting to try to use one activity to meet expectations in two areas, for example, teaching and scholarship. In fact, many doctoral students are advised to do just that by their faculty mentors as part of their socialization to the faculty role, and junior faculty members often are similarly mentored by their senior colleagues. One example of this practice is to require students to write a paper or project report for a course or degree requirement and also to submit the manuscript for potential publication, with the faculty member listed as co-author.
However, when the faculty member is compensated (with salary and workload credit) for teaching a course or advising students engaged in research, and he or she also gets publication credit for a co-authored article that is based on the same work, this practice can be viewed as ethically questionable. To what extent is the teacher's publication record attributable to the fact that he or she required students to write for publication and include the teacher as co-author? And is this fair to the student author who did the principal work on the paper or project with appropriate guidance from the faculty member in the role of teacher?
It is true that most nursing students enter undergraduate programs with little experience in writing for publication, and even master's degree and doctoral students may have limited competence in this area. To be fair, faculty members who are advising and guiding student projects often make significant contributions to the process of identifying research questions, collecting and analyzing data, preparing a publishable manuscript, and other tasks—work that may be under-recognized and unrewarded in any way other than authorship credit. As Oberlander and Spencer pointed out,
Students are transitory, and may move on or lose interest in projects after fulfilling degree requirements, whereas professors are more invested both personally and professionally in what is often an ongoing program of research.3(p226)
How can the professor's investment in students' development as scholars and his or her own commitment to scholarly productivity be appropriately balanced without the risk of inappropriate authorship credit? Faculty members have had little guidance to help them resolve this dilemma.3
The Faculty-Student Relationship
Many of the ethical dilemmas arising from student-faculty collaboration in publication are based on the nature of the faculty-student relationship. Professional and academic collaborations are egalitarian, but collaborations between faculty members and students are inherently unequal.1 The faculty-student relationship is characterized by a power disparity that creates potential for exploitation and harm. Teachers are responsible for promoting student learning and development, but they also evaluate students' work, assign grades, and write letters of recommendation, making students reluctant to address authorship credit issues for fear of damage to the relationship or retribution.1, 3, 4 This is especially true for graduate students who may have long-term professional links to their advisors and fear the actual or imagined consequences of questioning authorship practices.3
Guidelines for Authorship in Student-Faculty Collaborations
My search of the literature revealed no published guidelines from professional nursing organizations regarding authorship in student-faculty collaborations. However, such guidelines are available for professionals in counseling and psychology from the American Counseling Association (ACA),5 the American Psychological Association (APA),6 and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).7 Regarding student research, the ACA and APA provide similar direction, although the APA code of ethics focuses exclusively on publications resulting from a student's dissertation research, while the ACA ethical code includes manuscripts that are substantially based on students' course papers, projects, dissertations, or theses. These ethical codes agree that for this type of student work, the student should be listed as the principal author.
The AAMFT Code of Ethics 2001, section 6.3, provides the clearest guidance regarding authorship and student-faculty collaboration:
Marriage and family therapists do not accept or require authorship credit for a publication based on research from a student's program, unless the therapist made a substantial contribution beyond being a faculty advisor or research committee member.7
The key issue identified in that statement is whether the faculty member's contributions went above and beyond the reasonable and customary expectations of a faculty advisor or research committee member or chair. This determination is not easy to make, especially by editors of the journal to which co-authored student-faculty manuscripts are submitted. Although journal editors may request additional information to justify authorship credit, they cannot police author contributions to every submitted manuscript.
Possible Remedies
We must assume, lacking clear evidence to the contrary, that most faculty members who co-author manuscripts with students do not intend to inflate the value of their scholarly contributions or to exploit students. But how can nurse researchers, faculty members, students, and editors work together to prevent authorship abuse in faculty-student collaborations?
A large part of the problem arises from a lack of standards regarding authorship in the nursing profession. Professional organizations and associations are possible sources for improved guidance in this area, and they should make their expectations clear regarding assignment of authorship credit.3 Our professional codes of ethics also should include specific statements about student-faculty collaboration in publication,4 and professional journals should include clear guidelines for faculty-student authorship in their information for authors. But no guidelines, however specific, will be comprehensive enough to address all factors involved in the assignment of authorship credit.3
Mentors of nursing students and junior faculty members should engage them in discussions about authorship early and often. Mentors should reflect on their own beliefs about the relationships between teaching activities and scholarly productivity, often formed early in their own graduate programs. Although faculty members should motivate students to write for publication, they should keep the power differential between students and faculty members in mind to prevent exploiting and harming students.3 While socializing nursing students at every level into their appropriate professional roles, we also should emphasize publication ethics.4
Authorship decisions should be based on an evaluation of the relative contributions of faculty members and students to the work.3 Doctoral students should be at least first author, if not sole author, on publications based on their dissertation research because the intent of the dissertation is to demonstrate that the student was able to conduct independent original research. If a faculty member believes that his or her contribution to a doctoral dissertation is substantial enough to warrant authorship credit, the extent to which the student is competent in independent original research is in question.
If faculty members are not named as co-authors on student publications, their contributions to the project should be appropriately acknowledged, although such acknowledgements have little value in promotion and tenure decisions. Student authors should secure written permission from professors whose contributions they wish to acknowledge3 because readers of the published article may infer the faculty members' endorsement of the findings and conclusions.
Although the remedies proposed here might remove much of the ambiguity surrounding the question of who qualifies for authorship credit on faculty-student collaborative projects, they will not completely resolve the ethical dilemmas related to this issue. Nursing faculty members and students should be aware of potential authorship abuses as they write project reports intended for publication, senior faculty members should emphasize publication ethics when mentoring students and junior faculty members, and nursing journal editors should explicate clear expectations regarding faculty-student co-authorship. Despite these efforts, questions about authorship in specific circumstances will always arise; those questions should be answered by an evaluation of the relative contributions of faculty members and students to the work and reflection on the inherently unequal nature of the faculty-student relationship. Both faculty members and students have much to gain and much to risk when co-authoring a publication, but careful attention to ethical publication practices will prevent inappropriate authorship credit.
References
- . Reflections on determining authorship credit and authorship order on faculty-student collaborations . American Psychologist . 1993;48(11):1141–1147
- . Faculty-student collaborations: ethics and satisfaction in authorship credit . Ethics & Behavior . 2005;15(1):65–80 [serial online]
- . Graduate students and the culture of authorship . Ethics & Behavior . 2006;16(3):217–232 [serial online]
- . Authorship ethics: issues and suggested guidelines for the helping professions . Counseling and Values . 2006;50(3):208–216 [serial online]
- . American Counseling Association . http://www.counseling.org/Resources/CodeOfEthics/TP/Home/CT2.aspx 2005; Accessed May 18, 2009.
- Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. 2002. American Psychological Association . http://www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html#8_12 Accessed May 18, 2009.
- AAMFT Code of Ethics [effective July 1, 2001]. American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy . http://www.aamft.org/resources/LRM_Plan/Ethics/ethicscode2001.asp Accessed May 18, 2009.
PII: S0001-2092(09)00420-7
doi:10.1016/j.aorn.2009.06.003
© 2009 AORN, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc All rights reserved.
