Sue Tolleson-Rinehart
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5
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07-29-2007 02:47 PM ET (US)
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I thank the Working Group and the APSA staff who supported them for this fine beginning of a conversation about attribution. I believe that the five questions are a most helpful framework within which to continue the development of best practices. In this spirit, I add these thoughts for the Working Group's consideration:
1. I would invite the Working Group to add to its list of team collaborations (p. 4) the long-time Comparative State Feminism project led by Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur among others. That collaboration has, I believe, produced much collaborative and single-authored scholarship.
2. I too believe that collaboration will continue to increase in many political science subfields, at least partly because, I think, collaboration will be necessary to generate the resources supporting research projects. As the "entrepreneurial" approach to research continues to spread through the academy, now reaching into places in the Arts and Sciences that had not, in the past, often expected faculty to obtain their own research, collaboration will be an increasingly important strategy to attract research support, beginning with collaborative proposals to intramural university sources and to foundation and government funding partners. Thus an understanding of best practices in collaboration and attribution will only become more important, and best practice will be necessary as research projects are being envisioned, long before the first manuscript has been written. The Working Group's efforts could not be more timely!
3. Similarly, just as I believe that collaboration within political science will continue to increase, I believe that cross- and transdisciplinary collaborations will (or at least could) increase as well. This transdisciplinary activity calls even more strongly for clear guidance on the ethics and practice of attribution. Many forces inside and outside the university (including the interests of major foundation and federal funders) are pressing for multidisciplinary cooperation. Such multidisciplinary collaboration can be very good for political science and, I believe, even better for the disciplines with whom we collaborate, since we can bring our theoretical and analytical understanding to bear on problems that can profit from our approaches.
Such crossdisciplinary cooperation, though, will require strong mutual understanding of differences in attribution practices, and of the possible sources of common ground among disciplines. Political scientists' frequent practice, for example, of listing dual or multiple authors alphabetically, is virtually unknown in the biomedical sciences, where graduate students and junior faculty are enmeshed in an even more delicate and, in many ways, perilous web of considerations governing credit and attribution, and where the location of a name among a long list of authors can signify subtle levels of credit and rank.
The Working Group's efforts, then, can be a most constructive way not only of helping to establish best practices in political science but to begin a transdisciplinary discussion, the result of which might someday be an academy-wide agreement on productive, ethical, and collegial best practices for attributing credit. I would like to think that political scientists were among the leaders in the crafting of such guidance.
Once again, I thank the Working Group for its report and look forward to learning more about the progress of its deliberations.
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| Wendy Martinek
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3
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07-23-2007 04:36 PM ET (US)
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Any guidelines should pay particular attention to the inherent imbalance in power between faculty and graduate students, as well as the (often unwarranted but nonetheless widespread) assumption that graduate students are not co-equal collaborators. Assuming roughly equal efforts by both a faculty member and a graduate student, it would be preferable (in my view) for the graduate student's name to come first. Note that the operative work is "efforts" rather than "contributions".
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