Who’s in your team + what do they do?
| Role | Primary function | What they check |
|---|---|---|
| You | First author; lead researcher and writer | Execution, integration |
| Supervisors | Guide development; mentor writing process | Validity of reasoning, correct conclusions, addressed assumptions |
| Co-authors | Assess validity; serve as reviewer proxy | Validity of reasoning, correct conclusions, addressed assumptions, does paper deliver what it promises? |
Reality is blurrier
The table describes ideal functions. In reality, supervisors sometimes ghost; co-authors sometimes carry writing load.
Major co-authors
These are co-authors with substantial intellectual investment: they shaped the research design, provided critical expertise, or contribute significant data or interpretation. Involve them in direction-setting and conclusion-checking. “Minor” co-authors (technical assistance, routine data collection) typically join later for validity checks, not structural decisions.
See also: Authorship etiquette
When should you involve your writing team?
There are three major content-related decisions moments1 in writing up a research paper:
- Deciding on direction of the paper
- Establishing the research questions
- Developing conclusions
There are also three administrative decisions moments:
- When submitting a paper (see also: Submitting a paper)
- When resubmitting revised paper with a rebuttal (see also: Responding to reviewers)
- When getting published (see also: Acceptance worfklow)
I’ll explain below how to involve your writing team in the content-related decisions moments.
Realistic collaboration iterations:
In reality, involvement looks something like this:
- 1st draft finished: shared only with supervisors
- 2nd draft: shared only with supervisors
- 3rd draft: shared with supervisors and co-authors
- 4th draft: shared with supervisors and co-authors
- Submission-ready manuscript: shared with supervisors and co-authors
Deciding on direction of the paper
Include: supervisors, at least the ‘major’ co-authors. Deciding on the direction on the paper means two things:
- Roughly figuring out what questions you can answer with your data (i.e. establishing the aims and scope of your study)
- Choosing a journal that aligns with those aims and scope
Generally, there is some wiggle-room in what type of journal you can submit to given your research. And that wiggle-room is where it’s helpful to get everybody to agree.
Are you going for high-impact or specialised, and how specialised exactly? Which journal will you submit to, and what problems do you they address (theoretical, applied, something else, etc.).
This helps to get everybody on board so you don’t get disagreements later, or questions on why you didn’t do x, or requests for additional work.
See also: Choosing a journal
Establishing the research questions
Include: at least the supervisors This point is similar to the one above, but it’s more specifically about finetuning the research questions. I often see that students aren’t entirely aware of what questions they need to answer in their paper, leading to thin, repetitive Discussions.
See also: Interpreting the findings & Calibrating research questions
Developing conclusions
Include: supervisors and at least the ‘major’ co-authors. Once you’ve developed some form of conclusions you will want your writing team to check for gaps in the logic — that’s where there expertise shines! They will identify blind spots, jumps in your reasoning, unaddressed assumptions, missing literature, and more. It can be painful to have your reasoning attacked by so many people, but that’s part of the scientific process (see also: Know the Product. Besides, better now than during the review process…
Don't wait until your draft is flawless
You will always have blind spots, gaps in your reasoning, missing stuff in your Discussion. Don’t wait to share your work, it will just stall the process unnecessarily. Worried your work will reflect poorly on you? Just don’t share cluttered, chaotic documents. See also: Sharing work-in-progress.
You don't need a finished draft
You don’t have to wait until you’ve finished an entire draft before sharing your work. It’s much simpler to just hold a meeting and present your ideas, and take notes during that meeting to capture what you’ve decided.
Footnotes
-
I’m referring here only to decisions made while writing, not decisions made during the research itself (which are covered in Capturing research decisions). Having said that, the lines between decisions made during the research and decisions made during the writing are blurry, as writing often reveals that e.g. research questions or scope needs tightening (see also: Writing is not linear). ↩