Solo vs. co-authoring

[Sun_Worshiper]

Which do you prefer? Is there a norm in your field? If you do co-author, how do you find collaborators?

[Ruralguy]

These days, I prefer solo authoring, but I have many co-authored papers (most of them are). Its certainly the norm to have co-authors in the physical sciences, even for theory papers, but it isn't unheard of to have solo papers.

[Parasaurolophus]

Most things are solo in my field.

I have one forthcoming co-authored pub, another that's written but was rejected and is now in limbo while we decide what to do with it, and a third that I started but which my co-author never worked on (I'll revive it eventually).

I mostly find it easier to just do it all by myself, but a motivated co-author does cut down on the work, which is nice.


As for collaborators... I've pretty much just asked friends or friendly acquaintances. I've pitched two out of three, the third was pitched to me.

[mamselle]

It used to be a fairly straight humanities /sciences* split, but that's been changing for at least the past 20 years that I'm aware of.

M.

* Humanities: solo; Sciences: co-authored x 1,000 names per article

[Puget]

It is very rare for anything in psychology to be sole authored. I do have one sole author paper, a meta-analysis I did for comps back in grad school. Other than that, as a grad student and postdoc you publish with your mentor(s) and often other lab members and outside collaborators. Then as a faculty member that just switches and you publish mostly with your own mentees as first authors and you as last (senior author), as well as continuing to collaborate with others.

In terms of where I find collaborators, some are currently faculty colleagues where a grad student has often found a point of intersecting interests and lead the collaboration, others are long standing outside collaborators (the person I have a grant with has been a collaborator since we were both in grad school), others are more one-offs based on talking to someone at a conference or reading each others work and getting in touch with an idea, and some are still with former mentors. Collaborations often grow to pull in additional people with expertise we need. This sort of team science is my favorite way to work.

[Sun_Worshiper]

In my field, coauthoring and solo are both common, with the former becoming more common in recent years, and I have a mix of both, with about half of my articles being co-authored. My co-authored work tends to be of a higher quality, but working with co-authors can be a pain in the neck (two co-authors on two separate papers are giving me a headache right now), so I like to have at least a few solo projects ongoing at all times.

[Wahoo Redux]

English is almost exclusively solo authored.  It is not unusual for anthologies of various sorts to have several authors, but the nature of criticism and review don't really lend themselves to collaboration, although I suppose they could.  Craft and style are extremely important in literary criticism because you are writing to people who have an eye and ear for the poetry of the language, and that usually takes a single author honing hu's craft. Likewise, you are usually reading the interpretation of a literary work, and that is focused on one person's close reading generally.

The rhetoric and composition subfield (essentially the study of student composition and expository writing studies) tries to be empirical like the sciences, so it often has multiple-authored books and papers.

[jerseyjay]

History is largely sole authored. I suppose that some things that would be co-authored in STEM would be single-authored in history. For example, it is rare to see early career scholars publish anything with their advisor, while I understand it is the norm in some fields. Also, generally speaking, the authorship reflects the literal authorship--who wrote the paper. Research, data, etc., may be gathered with the help of others, but while these should be acknowledged, they do not count as authorship. It is my understanding that in the sciences at least authorship does not just reflect the act of writing something but providing intellectual assistance to the project as a whole (doing experiments, gathering data sets, analysis of the data).

All that said, there are some co-authored pieces in history, but they are relatively rare. I am not sure how much they would count towards tenure and promotion, for example..If somebody asked, I would advise a historian to wait till they have tenure before coathoring an article.

I am collaborating with several other historians on an edited volume, but that is different; and such a book counts much less for tenure or promotion than a monograph.

[poiuy]

I am in the social sciences. Both kinds of publications exist: solo and joint, depending on the nature of the research.

I also work with community engaged research approaches. Joint authorship here increasingly includes key community partners who may not be traditional researchers but are foundational to the research project and their authorship is one of several ways to promote / demonstrate reciprocity.

Also, in CE approaches, there is a wider range of research products, not just books and/or peer reviewed scholarly journal articles.  Technical reports, public scholarship pieces, community education materials, all written at a high standard of content though with very different styles, are included. Joint authorship with community partners becomes more important here.

[AvidReader]

Humanities here. Just co-authored a paper last fall for the first time, and it goes to print soon. It was delightful and I would love to do it again.

AR.

[Hibush]

Humanities here. Just co-authored a paper last fall for the first time, and it goes to print soon. It was delightful and I would love to do it again.

AR.

Did you find that discussing and developing the ideas in conversation with a co-author was more fruitful than doing so alone?

[AvidReader]

Did you find that discussing and developing the ideas in conversation with a co-author was more fruitful than doing so alone?

Very much so! My co-author works in a different humanities field on a different century, and found a manuscript from the turn of my century into hers that spanned our two fields. We spent a lot of time discussing the MS and its application to our two fields, free-writing paragraphs of observations, and recommending secondary criticism to one another before we built the structure of our argument, so we were able to draw some good connections between the two centuries and fields and I learned a great deal from the process. Even the revising was fruitful: we worked through the reviewers' and editors' comments together, and when one of us didn't like a suggested change, the other was able either to reinforce that resistance or to suggest a middle ground. Would that all writing went so smoothly!

AR.

[Hibush]

Did you find that discussing and developing the ideas in conversation with a co-author was more fruitful than doing so alone?

Very much so! My co-author works in a different humanities field on a different century, and found a manuscript from the turn of my century into hers that spanned our two fields. We spent a lot of time discussing the MS and its application to our two fields, free-writing paragraphs of observations, and recommending secondary criticism to one another before we built the structure of our argument, so we were able to draw some good connections between the two centuries and fields and I learned a great deal from the process. Even the revising was fruitful: we worked through the reviewers' and editors' comments together, and when one of us didn't like a suggested change, the other was able either to reinforce that resistance or to suggest a middle ground. Would that all writing went so smoothly!

AR.

Sounds like you got more scholarship, the kind of scholarly engagement most long for, and moral support. What a deal!

[Puget]

Did you find that discussing and developing the ideas in conversation with a co-author was more fruitful than doing so alone?

Very much so! My co-author works in a different humanities field on a different century, and found a manuscript from the turn of my century into hers that spanned our two fields. We spent a lot of time discussing the MS and its application to our two fields, free-writing paragraphs of observations, and recommending secondary criticism to one another before we built the structure of our argument, so we were able to draw some good connections between the two centuries and fields and I learned a great deal from the process. Even the revising was fruitful: we worked through the reviewers' and editors' comments together, and when one of us didn't like a suggested change, the other was able either to reinforce that resistance or to suggest a middle ground. Would that all writing went so smoothly!

AR.

Sounds like you got more scholarship, the kind of scholarly engagement most long for, and moral support. What a deal!

See what you've been missing folks in solo-authoring fields?
Seriously, if I had to do my research alone (presuming that was possible, which in my field it isn't) I would go do something else.

[mamselle]

Oh, I dunno, it's kinda fun finding stuff on one's own, and writing it up, sometimes, too.

But I do see the value of both.

Maybe it's a personal preference.

M.