Co-authoring & Collaboration

Lightly edited from Zoom’s automatic transcript, so expect some transcription errors. Speaker labels come from Zoom, and […] marks a passage that was cut.

Elisa D’Amico There we go, and then… I don't know if this is gonna work well. Can you see my presentation? And is it moving? Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I am gonna dive into this. Let me just hide this as much as I can. So, I am gonna talk about co-authoring and collaboration today. There's some stuff we're gonna talk about is interdisciplinarily. We're gonna talk a little bit about how to find co-authors. how to organize your co-authorship once it starts, pros and cons of co-authoring with people at various levels, and then hopefully I'll actually do this one quickly so that we can talk talk about it, because there's a lot to talk about. Okay, I'm gonna move. So… just really quick, especially if you're at the PhD candidate phase of your career. I created this, this is completely subjective, my own opinion, but I think it's… in everyone's career, it's almost always extremely valuable to collaborate. I think that when you're on the job market as a PhD student, you need to hit at least your one, like, pretty good… at least under review, solo-authored, like, publication. Whether it's… it's normally gonna be from your dissertation.

Elisa D’Amico I was a little late on this when I was coming on the job market, and I had more co-author heavy stuff going on, but that was kind of fine for what I was doing. And then my solo stuff came later, but I would recommend, like, making it a priority to get out your solo-authored thing, whatever it is, and then… co-authoring, but earlier in your grad school, your only opportunities really are to co-author, because A it's teaching you how to write a paper, since a lot of us have not done that before. And you kind of have, like, whoever you're co-authoring with kind of, like, guide you through that process, and there's other reasons why you get those opportunities if you're a research assistant, blah blah blah. So it's fine earlier in grad school, but hit the job market, you're gonna need to get one of your, like, dissertation papers out, more or less, but after that… then I think co-authoring is… it can… and collaborating can be a cheap-ish way to start, like, building up your publications, depending on the… co-authoring situation. Duh… yes, okay.

Elisa D’Amico And it is good to show, like, along this right side of the curve that you can do something not related to your dissertation alone as well, but it's less important. Okay, finding co-authors. So, I have so many thoughts on this. There are a lot of pros and cons of co-authoring with people at various levels, so… For senior faculty. They have written a lot of papers with graduate students, so that is helpful, but they have less, like, urgency, if not zero urgency, to publish, and sometimes they are… and they're also quite busy, sometimes they can forget what timeline you're operating within. So, like, you want to get stuff out for your career, but they have less urgency, and they might, like. Sometimes they forget what you know or don't know about, like, the co… or the… like, writing a paper process.

Elisa D’Amico Which we… I hope we have a meeting on that, but anyway, so… Yeah, it's… it's good and bad, but it can kind of be trial by fire if they, like, delegate things to you, and then you kind of go. The other thing that can be tricky about… co-authoring with very senior faculty, and I'll talk about this later, is the fact that sometimes they make you do all of the work. And you get little recognition, but anyway. So, junior faculty, I think, is the best to co-author with if you are at, like, a junior… like, you haven't done a lot, you don't have a lot on your publications yet. And this is because they've more recently been on the job market, they're more keen to mentor, they're… they know the journal situation better, you know, like, they're very in tune to what the current journals are, the current, like, editors, what's going on with that.

Elisa D’Amico They're stronger and sort of newer best practices on, like, the articles these days, sometimes. I mean, you know. But yeah, they're also more close to that stage where they didn't know how to write a paper, and they had to learn, so they're just… I think they're the best to co-author with. I think that having a really strong name on your papers can be great, but I think that for learning and for showing your own autonomy, honestly, the junior faculty can be better. And then other graduate students, especially outside your department, like, showing that you can network and connect and, like, engage with shared research interests, especially outside of your department or university, is really good. it's good to co-author with your friends in your department, or it's not bad, but it can be a little bit distracting from, like, your main thing, which is your dissertation.

Elisa D’Amico So, I would maybe recommend not doing that so much, but… Yeah, there's not really that same, like, competition for, like, hierarchy when you're amongst other graduate students, and you can, like, sort out the authorship order in ways that are meaningful, and have the author contribution statement. Again, I'll talk about that more later. Okay, conferences and networking, this is kind of going off of the, like, how you meet a co-author. Again, so for the senior faculty. I mean, junior faculty, other students, it's okay. Senior faculty, I would not really recommend cold emailing with, like, just a pitch of, hey, I think you're famous, I want to co-author with you, and I'll talk about that more later. So, to meet people. This is, like, what was so hard for me earlier in my career, as, like, a PhD or student candidate, was, like, the meeting people that have the same research interests as me, also, because I was, like, honing them myself.

Elisa D’Amico But the section meetings of conferences are really, really good. Sometimes if you have, like, a great panel that goes so well, you all get along, it's a great discussion. That is, like, the dream on how that, like, starts collaborations, but I don't know how often it really happens, but it does happen. And then receptions is a good way to network. I was at a reception, and, like, a senior faculty member just offered me an Oxford Handbook chapter. Like, out of nowhere, so, like, it's definitely worth going to these things, and not only… talking to your peers. Okay. provide good questions and comment at panels, and then follow up afterwards. This is a way to do it because it shows… so, like, if you're in the audience, in a panel, or somebody you're interested in working with, you can, like, ask good questions that are thought-provoking or impressive, and then like, go speak to the author afterwards, and then, like, maybe exchange emails, things like this.

Elisa D’Amico But have a pitch plan for that. Workshops, so I think the best way for… graduate students to meet each other is in these, like, methods workshops or multi-day workshops. I met, like, a lot of good graduate co-authors at… the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models workshop, which was 2 weeks long, which was kind of crazy, but, like, ICPSR and the… whatever the ECPS… Ecpr equivalence is also a great way to do this, and I've seen this done quite a bit. But the… again, be careful with the distribution of responsibilities with how, like, graduate student, only… collaborations kind of work. We can talk about that, too. Yeah, any networking you kind of do ever is useful for, like, a potential, like, collaboration in the future, because they'll hopefully remember your name. You don't have to have something prepared in the moment, but, like, especially as a young scholar, you want to be sort of, like.

Elisa D’Amico putting your name into that field a little bit. So don't forget to introduce yourself when you ask your questions at workshops, or at, panels as well. Okay. So… Looking across schools, this was something I found valuable as a… PhD student, so within… or schools or departments, I guess, depending on where you're from in the world. So, I remember I worked with a graduate student in statistics when I was in political science as a… as a graduate student, I just spoke to one of the stats professors about a question that I have, and introduced myself, and they, like. told me a little bit more about, like, their department, and said that they knew a student that was working on similar things would be interested in meeting, and so I had a collaboration out of that. So, you would be so incredibly surprised… well, maybe because this is a fairly interdisciplinary group, but, like, a lot of people are quite surprised at how many people are working on, like, the same exact thing, but across disciplines, and they're so siloed, they never meet.

Elisa D’Amico And there are pros and cons of being an extremely interdisciplinary scholar, depending on what your career path is. Happy to talk about that as well. But in general, like, I think it makes for strong papers, to have all of these vantage points. You can kind of bridge literatures, you can kind kind of find, like, proper gaps. You can… I think the best thing about these interdisciplinary collaborations is leveraging, like, an array of skills. And… like I said, the way I would kind of do it, if you're a graduate student, is maybe ask faculty in other departments, or your faculty in your department, to ask… see if they know anybody in other departments to get connections with students. Or maybe just join the different student groups. Okay, so… Cold emailing. I said I would talk about this a little bit more. So… Let me see what I just put together. Okay. Cold emailing can work, but usually only when you already have a stronger, developed idea or preliminary results. So, like I said, don't just cold email a faculty member being like, oh, I'm really keen… I'm such a fan of your work, blah blah blah, do not do this. So even I, as an assistant professor, don't really cold email, like, famous scholars that I'm not already in touch with.

Elisa D’Amico But I actually did do this recently, but when I did it, I had, like, an extremely developed plan, had all the data, I think I even had some preliminary results that I attached, and now we have a paper together, which is great, amazing, but, like. I mean, some of that might be because I'm already an assistant professor, but also, like. especially from students, you need to show that you have a very developed plan. Do you not really do this to anybody except for maybe other students without this plan? Okay, so… I kind of said this, referenced their actual work. So… I would try only to really do this if it's, like, an extremely targeted fit, and you don't want to rub them the wrong way and make them roll their eyes, so, like, be like, it's totally fine if, like, I know you have a lot on your plate and you're busy, but, like, just wanted to put this out there, that sort of thing.

Elisa D’Amico But definitely make sure they're actually a good fit. The volume of cold emails that I get from prospective students, or PhD students, or people that are trying to network. That the fit is not that strong. Is, like, a little bit frustrating. But I understand how it goes, like, it's, like, everybody's trying to just, like, saturate the market with their presence, that's fine, but it's gonna land better if you, like, more strongly engage with the scholar themselves and make it much more targeted. Yeah, but again, for other student collaborations or, like, policy universe collaborations, it can be really good. Okay. So this is a pipeline that… is… the authorship, like, from RA to, like, becoming first author in your collaborations, is a pipeline that's a little bit more common in North America, I would say. I think it varies, elsewhere, but we can talk more about this. So… And now, thinking a little bit about authorship order, so this is a hugely normative, norms-based thing. Like I said, some senior scholars will always be first author, no matter what, and, like, the graduate student will completely write the paper for them.

Elisa D’Amico I think that's becoming less of a thing as more senior faculty kind of retire. And authorship in, especially in political science, is changing a little bit to look a little bit more like the natural sciences and more of, like, having an authorship contribution statement, things like this. A little bit. But… Ideally, it's, like… like… work-based? But again, not always, and sometimes you have a little bit of self-servingness from faculty, maybe even on the tenure track, that also want to publish, or that want to publish for some sort of promotion. However, this is, like, the pathway I'm speaking of that's quite common, and this is kind of what happened to me, actually. But a lot of… PhD programs or whatever come… or even research collaborations in general and in the field come with sort of, like, something that mirrors more of a research assistantship, where you're providing a lot of support, maybe you're getting data together, maybe you're doing literature reviews, but you're… more doing, like, the evidence gathering, all of that that happens before the paper is written. I would say that this stage is normally not like… you're not brought on as a co-author just because you're doing some of that sort of, like, pre… like, pre-paperwork.

Elisa D’Amico And that can be a little frustrating, because you are doing a lot of work, but that's normally how it goes, it's how it went for me, and it's how I think sort of makes sense, but again, this varies. If you're doing empirical work, you should definitely be on the paper. But then, the idea is that you do such a good job as an RA that they then are like, wow, like… or maybe you contribute in the conversations when you're talking about what you've done, and you have ideas, and you think, oh, this could go this way, or I've thought a lot about this. That can then lead towards more of, like, a pulling you in as a… Co-author, maybe not on that paper, but maybe in the faculty's research agenda or the next paper. Because they'll remember, like, oh, that student was really, really great at this.

Elisa D’Amico And then… like… way down the line, after you learn how to write a paper, you're more of a scholar, and maybe you do have this shared research agenda with a faculty member, for example, then, like, eventually you'll be like, I have this idea, I'm doing this, I'm starting this, but, like, I know you're an expert as well, do you want to come in on this paper? And then, like, the dynamic has shifted from you, like. Learning how to support research, being a second author, maybe learning how to, like. like, still support research, but how to rate the paper, do it in, like, the paper format, being guided by the faculty member, and then you being able to sort of autonomously do that yourself. And this progression on your CV looks really good. It looks like you are, like, respected as… Like, somebody that is going from, like, supervisee or mentee to colleague, okay.

Elisa D’Amico again, I said this in the last slide, so I'll keep it quick, but just be a really good research assistant, and, like, engage with the content, what they're doing. It signals that you're, like, being scholarly about it, And… They'll want to keep you if you're really great at supporting them that way, and they'll notice it. Again, with the method stuff, this is sort of that same pipeline. That you can sort of contribute to as you're trying to, like, get into the… I'm an autonomous co-author sort of era, and then I've already talked about this. Okay, so… it's normally like this, again, depends. It's normally second author while you're learning the process, and you build trust, you start to do more autonomous things of your own, and then the mentee becomes the colleague type of a thing, and you can sort of, like, back and forth then after that with, Your, like, authorship order, and in those same collaborations.

Elisa D’Amico Okay, now how to make it work, because it can be tricky… This part is… this part is hard, and it really depends on the situation, and there are reasons why… it can be very hard to do this when you only have a paper amongst graduate students, because you haven't had as many natural experiences with this yet. So, you want to establish a timeline, of course. This is kind of obvious and much easier said than done. What I find really valuable is being, like, I want to submit this for X conference. And I want to present it, so that's your deadline. So you and your co-author need to get your respective parts done by that deadline. It doesn't always happen, but it can sort of, like, light a fire that sort of at least has them thinking that things keep progressing, and it gives you a commitment deadline as well.

Elisa D’Amico Rose being clear. This can change over time, but when you're learning how to write the paper more so. If it's a good faculty member and a good sort of mentor, they're gonna remember that you don't yet know how to write the paper super well, and they're gonna be very clear about what they want, and… you're gonna learn how to write the paper. And then, as this goes on, like, you'll more naturally kind of, like. Know where your roles fit if you continue this collaboration with this person. Author contribution statements… are a great idea for you to write no matter what, and… Early on in the paper, if you're doing some of the literal writing of it. Because it helps clarify, like, throughout the process, what you did, and if you need to go back later and have a conversation about authorship, you can kind of revisit that and be like, okay, well, let's kind of look and see who did what here.

Elisa D’Amico it helps a lot when, like, faculty members and others have, like, a lot on their plates. And then… Talk about the target journal early, so you should know where… this kind of varies, but more or less, it's helpful to know where you want to submit it, or at least what kind of journal, at least what field, And of what caliber you want the journal as well, because this… this directs how much time you're gonna spend on it, more or less, and how robust it needs to be, and… literally how the paper reads in layout and form, and the framing, and things like this. So this… Can it be very valuable upfront? But also sometimes just evolves as you go along. So, I say this, like, somehow in every single… meeting, but Overleaf can be really valuable, Markdown can be really valuable, GitHub, any ways that you can sort of do, like, your version control, but also, like, good formatting, because especially with references.

Elisa D’Amico and, like, cross-author collaboration, sending Microsoft Word documents around, it can be, like, a really big pain to deal with references when co-authoring. So this is why I recommend, like, something like Overleaf that has this, like. you all work in the same document dynamic. I think, of course, like, Google Doc maybe is okay with that. But again, it's a little bit harder to integrate the citation stuff in something like a Google Doc versus something like an Overleaf. And it's helpful to keep, like, in this same environment, wherever your organization of the paper is happening, it's helpful to keep, like, working notes for all the times you talk about this, like, somewhere in that world as well, or in that, like, ecosystem that you've established. Honestly, with some… it's changing, but with some faculty members, they are, like, very, like, I need to have a Microsoft Word document on my local computer, that's the only way I know how to write.

Elisa D’Amico I mean, in these cases, maybe at least, like, set up, like, a Google Drive or a OneDrive to kind of, like, centralize things and different versions of the paper, because, like. Inevitably, you're both gonna be working on the paper at once, and then you're gonna be, like, lost, and you're gonna have to mesh it together, and it's super frustrating. But I'm sure that this faculty member can at least handle, like, a Dropbox situation. Okay, collaborating across methods. This is, like, I find this so incredibly valuable, but there's definitely a learning curve with both you and your collaborator when doing this. Because quantitative and qualitative people, just, like, at… like, zooming way out, write papers different… very… for very different purposes, oftentimes, and… they look a lot different, for a number of reasons. I wish Kasia was here. But… There's also, like, the formal theory and the empirical stuff, which is, like, I think probably the best kind of paper that you can write. Some computational work is actually quite descriptive, and maybe could go hand-in-hand with qualitative quite well. Fieldwork, I don't know how, like, the proper mixed methods, like fieldwork plus maybe more of, like, an empirical, like, quantitative… I don't know how that works. That would be a question probably for somebody else, but it can be tricky to know pretty much just you need to decide on what type of journal it's gonna go to. Like, if I'm a quantitative scholar, and I'm collaborating with a qualitative scholar, but the paper is quite quantitative in nature, and it's gonna go towards, like, a more quantitative-friendly journal, then it sort of needs to read that way, and then the co-author will kind of, like, need to know what that looks like, so it's just good to sort of organize this up front.

Elisa D’Amico But I think it's great, because they… it provides more substance at every single level, it covers blind spots, it makes the paper stronger, in my opinion, it's just a lot of collaborating… er, more like calibrating up front. Yes, for these reasons, different standards of evidence, different timelines. Different ideas of what the main contribution is. Sometimes you can have, like, sort of a disconnected, like, theory from the empirics, but also sometimes that just happens in papers anyway. Okay. I think that… oh, good, okay, that's all I have. I am very happy to talk more about this. I think a discussion about this would be better. Happy to talk about… when to cold email, how prepared to be, how to balance collaboration along your own personal writing. This is more of, like, a lessons learned for me, because I have very little balance.

Elisa D’Amico Pros and cons of collaborating with different people, Also, I would like, if there's some interest, to talk a little bit more about collaborating with the… more of, like, the policy world and the public sector, because this is, certainly a big part of it as well. Okay. I'm gonna stop recording.