On (co-)authorship

I believe there is often more credit to go around than we give each other. (Co-)authorship is one important way to ensure someone is being appropriately credited for their work and input. Authorship, however, does not only come with credit, but also with responsibilities.

When doing research for enough years, sooner or later many of us get to a point where we need to decide whether we are comfortable with being credited as an author on a paper or project. Many of these decisions are easy and clear cut, but that is not always the case. A few years ago—after dwelling on this for an unreasonable amount of time—it felt useful to explicitly articulate what I personally need to feel comfortable with being an author. I landed on two questions:

Have I contributed or done enough work to deserve authorship? Have I earned it?

Can I defend the work?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, I should not be an author. While the first question is perhaps much more commonly considered (as it should!), the second one feels more neglected to me.

Of course, answering these questions also involves some level of subjectivity. For instance, what constitutes enough might depend on the nature and type of contributions the work makes.1 Folks can also have different thresholds for what it means to be able to defend the work. For instance, for me this means that I can, at a minimum, defend the methodological choices and the claims the work makes.

I do want to recognize that what one conceptualizes as enough can reflect quite problematic patterns. For instance, certain types of work are more likely to remain unrecognized, which may—and often does correlate—with who conducts that work. However, I am writing this reflection from the perspective of what authorship entails for me, rather than what others do.