Two questions regarding co-authorship and supervisors' involvement on a paper - please help!

[psychstudent2990]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for clicking on my post. I just have a couple of questions regarding a paper I'm working on for publication at the moment.

Question one:

I did my honours year in psychology last year, and this year I have been working towards publishing a paper using the data from my honours year and some of the content.

I worked on my thesis last year at an external institution, and so had three external supervisors, who were all intensely involved. About a quarter of the way through the year, we included another external supervisor who has expertise in qualitative analysis. Those four supervisors will be co-authors on my paper.

I also had an internal supervisor at my university, because I had to. He was assigned to my project and did not have any experience in the area my thesis was on, but he was still my supervisor, and we had a couple of meetings at the university, he attended my thesis defence, read through a draft once and provided me with a bit of moral support. I have decided that I would also like him to be a co-author on my paper.

My other external supervisors (mentioned above), have now said that if I include him (my internal supervisor) that I have to make another student a co-author too (whom I've only met once). This other student was originally going to take the project on, but swapped courses and projects at the last minute. Apparently she was involved in the initial design of the project and submitted the ethics application.

I don't really agree with my external supervisors on including her, but am not sure what to do. What do you think? Should I make the other student a co-author?

Question two:

I have been working on my paper for the majority of the year, and have written my introduction, method, results and discussion. My original three external supervisors have been reading my drafts, and have made a few changes here and there, but nothing too major.

My other external supervisor, the qualitative research expert, read it last week, and has completely changed my results section (and consequently I'll have to change my discussion). She has changed the structure, changed the themes, changed what I've written - and essentially changed everything except for the quotes from the participants. My other supervisors agree with the changes she has made, and so, I'm working through them now. She has also asked me to include more qualitative analysis here and there.

I'm a little confused, because she didn't make this many changes to my thesis last year, and I got a HD for my thesis (81%). I'm thankful that I'm receiving help, but I also feel as though what I've done isn't good enough, and that I'm not capable to pursue a career in research.

What do you think? How would you interpret her editing?

Thanks so much!

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[WisNeuro]

Question one: IF she was involved with the design of the study, yes, she should be included.

Question two: As an undergrad expect it to be heavily edited prior to publication. If your supervisor has published extensively, they know what it takes to get it into a journal. Be thankful. As a grad student in psychology trying to publish research, this will happen again. This is a learning process. Not many people are ready to independently publish as an undergraduate or even as an early graduate student. Take the opportunity to learn from it, next time around, incorporate those edits/suggestions and learn from the new edits you will receive. This is just how things go.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Agree with everything WisNeuro said.

Question one: As mentioned, if the person played a role in helping to design the study, then yes, they should be included as a co-author. Probably even more deserving of being included than if, say, they'd simply read/reviewed a few drafts or coded some data.

Question two: An undergrad thesis and a journal article are going to be held to different standards. For the former, faculty are generally more concerned with just seeing that you can navigate the scientific process, that your design methodology was reasonably sound, that you chose reasonably appropriate analyses, and that you interpreted them decently. If you received that grade, then what you did was good enough. However, when it comes to manuscripts, the story you're trying to tell with the data is just as important as the data itself. Thus, this expert likely knows the current directions and trends in the field, and probably made the changes to be in line with that information and to best fit the climate (and maximize the chance of publication). There were probably various components involved, including increasing the novelty of the analyses and results to make the findings more interesting and relevant. These aren't necessarily things you need to worry about extensively for a thesis, where again, the emphasis is generally just on learning the research process itself.