There is an interesting post and set of comments on Crooked Timber on co-authorship in academia and whether having many co-authored papers is detrimental to one’s tenure prospects. It is clear that there are large variations between fields and among individual institutions.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Wednesday, October 6th, 2004, at 3:38 pm.
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Barwise & Cooper is a landmark in the field of Semantics, as much as Chomsky & Halle is in Phonology, if I am not wrong. Among some of the most influential and most quoted works there are some co-authored texts. Their quality cannot be easily questioned.
I think that first of all it is a matter of rules respecting the kind of work that is in question. For instance, under the criteria of intellectual honesty and academic propiety, co-authored papers or books are ok, but a co-authored PhD thesis is simply out of question.
In the are of Mathematics some Institutions in Brazil have adopted a point based system to evaluate Faculty members’ production: a single author paper counts as 1 paper in his production, a two author paper counts as 1/2 paper in each author’s production, a three author paper as 1/3 and so on.
October 7th, 2004, at 7:51 am #Tony, you write “For instance, under the criteria of intellectual honesty and academic propiety, co-authored papers or books are ok, but a co-authored PhD thesis is simply out of question.” Actually, when I was chatting with my friend Thony Gillies yesterday about this, we both immediately thought of perhaps the most successful collaboration in the history of semantics: Groenendijk & Stokhof’s series of seminal papers, which included a set of papers on questions that formed their joint (!) PhD dissertation.
October 7th, 2004, at 8:09 am #Oh! I did not know they wrote a joint PhD thesis! I sincerely was not aware of that.
Well, for me it is strange, but I still greatly respect and admire their work. Perhaps this has to do with different cultural standards. In Holland they often call one’s Graduate final work as ‘a book’ more than a ‘PhD thesis’. There are some subtle differences between these two terms. I was raised in a tradition under which a PhD theis is not the same as a book, and which requires a PhD thesis to have one single author.
In any case, of course, anything that has been written by Groenendijk and/or Stokhof can be considered hors concours.
October 7th, 2004, at 8:28 am #