Re: about the coauthor and doctoral dissertation

On Jan 28, 6:09 am, wzt <wangzeng...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi, everyone,
I have a question about the coauthor things.
I am working on my doctoral dissertation, someone thought I can
cooperate him for a working paper.

I do not know how it works, if I cooperate with someone else, it will
affect my dissertation? Any suggestions about that? I totally have no
idea of this things.

Thanks you!

Typically, the dissertation is your work. In practice, you and your
adviser will work in conjunction on the first paper. The last paper of
your dissertation is supposed to your own idea and more independent
work. Typically, coauthors arise in a few ways. Your adviser may need
significant help gather say the data. A friend of mine got to coauthor
because she was the RA on a huge project and got most of the data and
had some input on the project. Secondly, if the adviser is highly
interested in one of your papers, he may offer to coauthor after the
paper is finished. Another friend had her first paper in her
dissertation largely rewritten and some tweaking done that found
results that were not originally intended for the paper. She
coauthored with her adviser in the end. Your adviser or other faculty
may invite you to help them on a paper in which you will be a coauthor
as well. Typically in the dissertation process coauthorship of parts
of your dissertation is rare. It generally only happens after the
paper is "finished". That being said if you display good skills you
may very well be invited by professor who does research in your field
to help with a project and you can be a second or third author.

Do be careful. I had my original adviser once discuss a topic at
length. I decided another topic was more interesting. A few months
later he asks me to read a draft that had a significant amount of MY
ideas in it, in which he conveniently forgot that I told him about
several of the papers he cites, pointed out some of the facts he based
the paper on to him, and even discussed how to approach some of the
modeling with him. You can get burned if you are not careful. I still
feel a invitation to coauthor that paper should have been extended and
was not simply because I was a graduate student. He knew doing a
colleague like that would have gotten major complaints. I still
consider changing advisers the best decision I made in graduate school
and wish I had done it earlier. Some advisers will have you read a lot
of papers. You need to do that. You must be familiar with the
literature. It is hard to do but be careful that the papers you are
reading are for your benefit and not because your adviser wants to
know what is in them and wants you to read them for him and
communicate a detailed report for him so he does not have to read it.
Make sure you get to know your adviser and can trust speaking openly
about your ideas without fear that they will discourage you from
acting on an idea and then taking the idea and publishing it
themselves as though they came up with it. Graduate students are
entitled to proper credit for work put into a project but it is hard
to prove that was my idea or that I had the idea to approach a model
in this way if it is mostly verbal with a little note taking. If you
feel you can not trust an adviser. ALWAYS, put any idea you think
might be good in some form of writing as soon as possible. That way
you have something to show him and your graduate director if six
months he suddenly comes up with a submission based solely on ideas he
got from you.

This is the tough part. An academic career should be one of open
communication and you, your adviser, and your colleagues should
collaborate and freely exchange ideas. Just make sure you protect
yourself and either put things in writing to discuss an idea or do not
speak about ideas with people you can not trust to take the
conversation and then say look at my new idea. Also be weary of
advisers who want to just give you ideas. There was a certain well
cited professor at my university whose approach to advising was to
simply give a student an idea he did not want to do, or thought was
not a good enough idea to get in a journal that would enhance his
reputation. It will make your life a little easier but, it will lower
your reputation in the eyes of those who realize how this professor is
and set you at a disadvantage if you want to go into the academic
world. There will come a time when you have to be the idea generator.
Idea generation is an entirely different skill set than knowing how to
take directions from adviser. As a professor idea generation is just
as important as skills to analyze the idea. You have to no longer be
and student and answer questions some asks you. You have to ask
interest questions and answer them yourself. Sometimes the interest
question can be hard to find. A lot of seemingly great ideas get shot
down by data or just when you scratch the surface of them. It takes
experience to get a feel for which ideas will work and which will not.
The more experience at coming up with your ideas you have, the better
off you will be.

Late in the dissertation process and after you finish coauthor
usually occur because you have an interest in a topic and you mention
it to a former faculty member or your adviser. Usually two people who
are highly interested in the project will coauthor.
.