Hi Reader!

In this week's lightweight edition, we bring you two ideas to support your scientific writing: a flashback to our post covering how to navigate authorship in your papers, and a tiny idea on how to manage communication with your co-authors for a more nimble writing process.

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Flashback: Navigating authorship: a condensed crash course in setting authors for your paper​

(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog)

Aside from the single-author doctoral dissertation itself, many doctoral processes require us to publish before writing/compiling the "big book". This flashback from a while ago goes over the basics of paper authorship: a thorny, under-reported dilemma, rife with tacit knowledge and power struggles for many doctoral candidates:

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Tiny idea: Feedback options, not checkpoints

(Small ideas or practices –told bluntly and without much background– that I only share with newsletter subscribers)

Co-writing a paper, especially beyond one or two co-authors, can become a protracted process. If, on top of that, you try to have multiple feedback cycles (as we recommend), co-authoring a paper can feel like swimming in molasses. You send out an outline or a draft, and then wait, and wait… and wait until everyone can finally look at it and tell you something. To ameliorate this problem, when sending out your materials give people the option to provide feedback (and say how and about what you expect feedback, with a clear but reasonable deadline), but also lay out the next steps you’ll take if there is no feedback (also with a clear timeline). This means their feedback is not a checkpoint that needs to happen before the process continues. You will feel less stalled by others, and co-authors will still feel included in the process (and even relieved to know that things will progress even if they cannot contribute at this specific step).

I recently heard this tactic given a name, and suddenly realized that I had been using it for years… and that the more effective doctoral students I know were using it to deal with my (sometimes erratic) feedback response times. Try it out in your collaborations – and give people the option to tell you if they were bothered by it, or felt included and relieved. YMMV!

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May all your collaborations be smooth!

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