Authorship issue between two PhD students

Question

I have a little dispute over co-authorship on a paper, and I would appreciate feedback on whether I am handling this appropriately (or if I am being an asshole or not).

I am a PhD student in applied mathematics, focusing on theoretical and methodological statistics. About a year and a half ago, I initiated a collaborative project with another PhD student from a different city. Our agreement was that I would handle the theoretical aspects (proofs and writing) while he would develop and code the algorithm. We agreed that I would be the first author.

I finished my part almost a year ago. Then he started working on his part. It took him almost a year and he did...something. But, in my opinion, it was not good. The algorithm he developed only worked under extremely restrictive assumptions that were not necessary and did not follow from the theory. I also had concerns that its occasional success might be coincidental as I more and more think the underlying idea does not make much sense.

So I looked into the 'algorithm' part myself in April. In April (took me about three weeks), I created a new algorithm and finished coding it (a completely different approach than his, no parts of his work used). It works provably better with no strong assumptions, and (yes, this is just my opinion and intuition) it beautifully matches the theory, and it makes sense that it works.

So I wrote it down in the manuscript what I did and I finalized the paper in the last few weeks, which does not include any of his contributions. Upon discussing authorship, my collaborator insists he should be a coauthor, arguing that this was a joint project from the start and he invested considerable time in it. I disagree, as I have spent immensely more time on it and all current ideas, code, and writing are mine.

We have scheduled a meeting with our PhD supervisors next week to discuss this issue. Am I justified in requesting his removal from the paper? I do not want to have bad reputation and bad personal relations with them, however I wouldn't feel comfortable with sharing credit for something that I created.

Note: There is something that I did wrong about this collaboration. I did not communicate well with him about how and what I was doing in the last month. I told him that I had another approach for the algorithm part, and when I finished the algorithm, I explained it to him (not in deep detail), and we both agreed that it was a better algorithm. Then we did not communicate for the last few weeks while I finished the rest (and yes, his part) of the paper. My rationale was that I did not see how he could help and I wanted to expedite the project's completion, especially since it always took him a long time to do stuff and I just wanted to have this project done and finished.

I appreciate any insights or advice you can provide on this matter. Note that this is just my point of view of the story, and maybe he sees it differently.

Answer 1

I would say "Be generous and don't attach too much significance to the appearance (or lack thereof) of certain combinations of curved symbols (a.k.a. "letters") in the author line" to both of you. Neither has your co-author a real reason to insist on being there, nor have you a real reason to insist on removing a person whom you did work with from there. I often include all people with whom I communicated about the problem in any minimally meaningful way as co-authors and occasionally decline the co-authorship even if others think that I deserve it. IMHO, once the offer has been made, it should stand, so no one should try to force others out, but no one is obliged to accept the offer either, so everyone can opt out him/herself any time.

This attitude has brought me quite a lot of collaborators and good acquaintances (occasionally even friends). Trying to figure out who contributed exactly how much usually results in nothing but making enemies. Don't worry: you are pretty certain to make plenty of enemies during your lifetime no matter what, so there is no need to start right away. Also, I'll tell you one secret: the "collaboration of equals" is rather rare (though not entirely unheard of). In almost every team, one or two people are more equal than others and one or two (not necessarily the same ones) do a lion's share of work. Live and let live. Don't pick up collaborators with whom you have been unhappy about in the past again, but don't expect too much "fairness" when you start a new project (and be wary of people who hold such expectations in general).

As to "losing something by sharing (or diluting) the credit for the work", I wouldn't be afraid of that. During my 30+ year career, I published only 5 or 6 single author papers (out of nearly 200) and that didn't hurt my reputation in the slightest (or, at least, I have never noticed the harm). You've made the paper better by resetting and re-coding the algorithm? Great! Derive as much moral (or whatever) satisfaction from being stronger and smarter as you want, but do not kick the weaker person for not being capable to hold up with the demands of the project. Believe it or not, you'll find yourself in that position too now and then if you collaborate with really strong people (I definitely had such experiences myself).

Just my two cents :-)

Answer 2

From your own description, it sounds like you've tried to bully this coauthor off the project. By not giving them an opportunity to improve things you made decisions unilaterally to exclude them.

As part of a collaboration, you didn't have the right to make unilateral decisions to change the relative contribution to the project.

I think because of these actions you're kind of stuck. You had an ethical responsibility to give the collaborator an opportunity to contribute, and you didn't. Probably the simplest next step is to let them be an author. It is reasonable to have further expectations of them as a coauthor like assisting in any further preparation necessary for publication, you may have them review and give a third party look at the robustness of your code, etc. But, I don't think you can nudge them out by having just done their work for them.

Answer 3

You are first author either way. If you include him, you lose nothing and recognise the work that he put into it, even if it didn’t end up being the final version. If you exclude him, you gain nothing but a sense of validation, an enemy, and potentially a reputation for being untrustworthy.

This might be field dependent. I’m in a field that is sometimes over-generous with co-authorships; you are in a field in which sole authorship is more common. But from my perspective, there’s nothing to be gained by sticking to your guns on this.

Answer 4

I agree with fedja's approach, "once the offer has been made, it should stand". Yeah, you lose out (sharing authorship vs single), but probably not a great deal. It's irritating and rationale for better communication throughout the process, as you observed. I feel your pain as a grad student, working hard to develop a strong reputation in your field, and it sounds like you're in the right, but it's also important to develop a reputation as someone with whom it's desirable to collaborate...even if that collaboration isn't always perfectly equitable.

Answer 5

At my university during orientation they told us that even people you have a conversation with that just gave you an idea towards your paper need to be at least a last author, even if they didn't contribute any work. It's really about covering yourself, you don't want to get in trouble with the university for plagiarism. You read the other student's code and then built your code, and you claim that it's completely different but reading it might have given you ideas about how to approach the problem in a more general way but following a similar set of steps. I can't imagine that you were not at all, possibly subconsciously, influenced by it in your implementation. You might not even realize it, people's memories are often imperfect like this: you might read something and a few days later genuinely believe it was your own idea. So even if you may be justified in saying their implementation wasn't good enough quality, I would definitely not remove them from the paper entirely, maybe they shouldn't be coauthor but that is something you should discuss with both advisors and your school/department for policy.

Answer 6

I would use the CReDiT taxonomy to confirm contribution and then use that to discuss authorship.

It seems to me that you both worked collaboratively during the course of the project and probably the algorithm you developed benefited from discussions with this colleague. That ought to be recognised somehow alongside conceptualisation.

Answer 7

It's good that you have the meeting with both of your PhD supervisors. You should listen to them more than anyone here. That being said, here are my two cents.

I disagree with the other answer by Significance: it's not the case that you have nothing to lose: a single author paper can potentially carry much more weight on your CV than a two author paper. It varies a lot by field as to how much "credit" one gets for being on a paper with n authors. Sometimes it is almost independent of n, and sometimes it is more like 1/n. In some fields, there can be a significant advantage for early career researchers to have single author papers, since it demonstrates their independence (this is partly true in theoretical physics, and I imagine this to be very true in mathematics).

From the way you have described the situation, it sounds like you should the sole author, and the other student would be only mentioned in the acknowledgements. But as you admit, this is only your side of the story, and maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. I would advise you to really try to have a productive meeting with your PhD advisors to sort out the issue, and maybe to also ask the opinion of other senior researchers in your field.

Answer 8

I actually didn't know this until I started writing collaborative papers, but it's quite rare that all authors on a manuscript will have contributed exactly equal amounts.

My first collaboration paper had four authors, it was me and one of the other authors that contributed 80% of the content, the other two authors contributed 20% combined and that's being generous.

Answer 9

It depends on the scientific field. I think this could be the crux of your problem - in your field perhaps the authorship is more limited, in his (I assume he is CS, because he was coding) it is wider.

In any case I think there are 2 main points here:

1. "(co)authorship" in science may be much wider term that you are used to. In some fields, where data acquisition is extremely difficult, people who just acquire data are routinely co-authors. In your case, maybe the coding was also difficult part (which you then handled better than him), so there is possibility that it is expected that he is the coauthor. Discussions, ideas, this all may be worthy of an coautorship.
2. You made a mistake of not communicating with him earlier. Solving his part of work in parallel when he was still working on it, and then saying "my code is better" is absolutely the reason that any future co-authors will look at you with suspicion (this time it was programming, next time it could be data collection, validation, or whatever task you can do better than the coworker).

I'd say, he should be co-author.