Studies show that collaborative scholarship is on the rise in many fields.[1]
And most researchers are well aware of the myriad benefits that can result from coauthorship.[2]
But what can keep scholars from enjoying collaborative research—or engaging in it at all—are the very real logistical and intellectual challenges posed by the coauthor relationship. As editors and writing consultants, we know that careful, advanced planning and open, formalized communication offer the cure to almost any coauthoring ailment. Here are the most important things to consider:
1. Make sure long-term plans are clear from the start. Each coauthor’s interests may be driven by something very different—an impending review, interest in a particular journal, longstanding research goals, etc. Whether you intend to work together on a series of paper, coauthor one main paper while individuals take on sub-papers, or something else, sketching out long-term plans at the onset of your collaboration will ensure that the goals of everyone on your team are met.
2. Relatedly, make sure the details of authorship and intellectual property are crystal clear. While some fields may dictate specific authorship criteria, others are far looser.[3] And as Fine and Kurdek (1993) note, these decisions can be complicated by issues of seniority and interpersonal clashes. An open and ongoing dialogue about contributions and responsibilities can engender clarity, particularly because the specifics of authorship credit may very likely need to evolve along with the project.
3. Keep a written record of all discussions and agreements. Headaches stemming from misunderstandings and miscommunication can be avoided with clear recordkeeping. This includes not only agreements about authorship, but also deadlines, publication goals, and all other decisions that affect the project.
4. Make use of technology. Tools like Endnote and RefWorks, Word’s “track changes” function, and the cloud’s many data sharing possibilities make the logistics of collaborative work far less challenging than ever before. Find the right tools for your project, and get all your coauthors on board with using them.
5. Clarify the division of labor for the actual writing of the paper. This may depend on various coauthors’ interest in and facility with writing, the agreed-upon terms of authorship, or other factors. Clarifying responsibilities for other process-related issues, which may not seem important at the outset but which can be very time-consuming (such as compiling individually authored sections or handling the actual journal submission), ensures far more efficient work.
6. Use an editors’ trick of the trade and create a style sheet for all of your coauthors to follow. This upfront time investment will ultimately—and exponentially—simplify the process of collating individually authored sections. Once the paper’s content is complete, consider designating the most experienced writer as the paper’s ultimate editor—or, better yet, hire an expert who can suss out inconsistencies and correlate usage, style, organization, and more.
[1] For example, Ginsberg and Miles (2011) and Greene (2007) document these trends in legal and scientific research, respectively.
[2 ]We’re thinking not only about the intellectual benefits and possible advancements to scholarship, but also the way that coauthoring allows individual researchers to gain experience in new areas and take on projects for which they might not otherwise have time. Some even consider coauthorship to be a solution to declining journal acceptance rates).
[3] See, for example, the useful survey of the authorship guidelines of prominent scientific organizations included in a study by Osborne and Holland (2009).
References
Fine, M. & Kurdek, L. (1993). Reflections on determining authorship credit and authorship order on faculty-student collaborations. American Psychologist, 48(11), 1141-1147.
Ginsberg, T. & Miles, T. (2011). Empiricism and the rising incidence of coauthorship in law. University of Illinois Law Review, 2011, 1785-1826.
Greene, M. (2007). The demise of the lone author. Nature, 450 (7173), 1165-1165.
Osborne, J. & Holland, A. (2009). What is authorship, and what should it be? A survey of prominent guidelines for determining authorship in scientific publications. Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 14(15), 1-19.
Behind the Scenes at APA: MWS Interviews Mary Lynn Skutley, Editorial Director
Despite its biblical authority, Skutley and her team know that the APA’s role is to serve the manual’s users and reflect their concerns rather than dictate rules from on high. Ultimately, the APA’s primary responsibility is to meet “the needs of researchers and writers, to make their work easier and to encourage the smooth dissemination of information.”
Of course, revising the manual is a Sisyphean task, given the ever-changing universe of scholarly publication. Creating the sixth edition was a painstaking process that entailed soliciting feedback from general users, panels of experts, and internal task forces and editorial boards: “One paragraph in the manual may be the product of an incredible volume of discussion and analysis,” Skutley reported.
Many of the updates reflect changes in technology and information sharing. In the sixth edition, Skutley explained, “there were a lot of changes in referencing, with the beginning of digital object identifiers [DOIs] and changes in tracking online resources.”
Other updates involve trying to eradicate bias in language and dealing with historical bias in existing publications; making the organization of the Manual more intuitive and user-friendly; and clarifying concerns about intellectual property and plagiarism in light of changing practices around data sharing.
Maybe the most useful addition has been a companion blog that works to keep pace with changes in the field between editions. APA’s editors diligently respond to questions and criticism, and flexibility is a priority in their decision-making. Skutley wants to “make things as easy for the user as possible—so rather than developing new forms for new kinds of references, for example, we’re trying to use existing forms and communicate them through blog posts.”
As an editorial maven herself, we asked Skutley about her favorite resources for writers. Her personal go-to text is Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. For APA users, she also recommends the blog, along with the manual’s companion website.
As for the seventh edition of the manual, its timing “really depends on what happens in the field over the next several years,” Skutley says. And she’s grateful for a bit of respite before starting to push that boulder up the hill again.
Smoother Syntax…On Demand?
If, however, you are part of a business with a solid but overextended communications department, or if you expect top-quality materials at first pass that reflect and respond to your business’s mission, principles, and clients, the benefits of an on-demand editor or writer might not be worth the transactional cost.
In the on-demand marketplace, employers outsource parts of projects to specialized workers: Employers take a risk on a relatively untried entity, and workers compete to offer the cheapest rates. While the piecemeal, competitive approach works for some services, it can result in an inconsistent, substandard product for others.
This is particularly true of writing and editing projects. A business communicates its vision of itself in the documents it produces. Whether internal or external, every project is high-stakes. While a one-off editor may be able to offer an immediate solution to a temporary problem, there’s no guarantee that the services won’t be worth the low price paid. When the stakes and expectations are high, a writer with whom you are building a relationship will offer both immediate solutions and future strategies.
We embrace the on-demand economy—but maybe only part of it. For us, the time we spend building client relationships is the best part of what we do. We’ve learned (and our clients have, too) that with every project we complete, we are better prepared and more capable of anticipating and exceeding our client’s future needs.
Finding the Right Editor: A Love Story
• Type of edit: Having a paper edited can mean many different things, and some editors specialize, while others offer a range of services. Are you looking for a simple proofread (i.e., a check for typos and spacing problems), do you need a developmental editor (i.e., someone who can help you develop a draft-in-progress by identifying areas for development and streamlining structure), or something in between (i.e., a substantive edit or copyedit)? Often, writers aren’t sure exactly what they need. A good editor should be able to look at your document and quickly suss that out.
• Method(s) of communication: Do you work in Word, or do you need someone who is comfortable with LaTeX? Do you prefer to communicate online, or do you want to meet face-to-face? Consider what you need in terms of the logistics of communication.
• Style: It can be hard to see someone examine your writing with a critical eye—but of course, that’s an editor’s job. The nature of the approach varies, however: do you prefer someone with a soft-and-gentle approach, or a take-no-prisoners approach? Think about how you respond to criticism and find someone who’s going to complement that.
• Experience: While some editors may specialize in particular fields (e.g., health sciences, humanities, etc.) it is virtually impossible to find someone who is a subject-matter expert on precisely your topic—and that’s okay. An experienced editor is used to working with unfamiliar content. For editors, flexibility across disciplines is more important than knowledge within a discipline. This is less true of documentation styles: finding someone who has specific experience with whatever style you’re using ensures more efficient work.
• Turnaround time: Are you a long-term planner, or do you tend to work last-minute? Find someone whose turnaround can accommodate your work habits (but be wary of anyone who claims to turn around a 150-page manuscript in 48 hours). If you have a set deadline for a project, make sure to communicate that up front, and be aware that most editors charge a higher rate for rush work.
• Pricing: Some editors work on a per-project basis, others per-hour, page, or word. Make sure the terms are clear, and don’t be a sucker for bargain-basement pricing. When it comes to an editor’s fee, you may find out that “too good to be true” is absolutely accurate.
A good editor should be willing and able to discuss all of these issues and to provide references upon request. And many will perform a sample edit of a few paragraphs or pages to give you a sense for the scope and style of their work.
While it can take work to find the right editor (and courage to share your work), the benefits are great: You’ll end up with a polished piece of writing and a relationship that can serve as a future resource. In fact, in our experience, it’s a relationship that only gets better with time—working with a good editor on an ongoing basis means that the editor can get to know you as a writer, can work more efficiently, and ideally, can support you on individual projects while also helping you becoming a stronger and more confident writer.
Consistency Counts
We all intuitively recognize good stories: a good yarn piques our interest and engages us. A great story connects with us in a way that outlasts the story’s end.
Consequently, crafting a great story requires establishing and sustaining connections that are meaningful enough to resonate with increasingly sophisticated readers.
How are such connections forged? While identifying the right readers is certainly crucial, businesses must also offer readers consistent and consistently genuine insights into their brands.
Such insights depend, not surprisingly, on consistent language. While most businesses possess mission statements and mottoes, these rarely offer language that is flexible enough to be continuously generative.
A business must also be able to express:
A thorough and precise accounting for these fundamentals allows businesses to build a glossary—what content strategists call message architecture—that can be used in different ways to speak to value, vision and motivation.
Such a glossary is invaluable for consistently crafting really good stories. But just as important, it enables cohesive communications across the board, from internal emails and memos to external reports and presentations. It can also simplify connected cross-platform outreach, from business newsletters and websites to LinkedIn pages and Twitter handles.
If storytelling were only about entertainment, writing stories would be easy. However, a really good story—one that outlasts its ending—must do much more. To put it plainly, when it comes to storytelling, consistency counts.
Coauthor S.O.S.
But what can keep scholars from enjoying collaborative research—or engaging in it at all—are the very real logistical and intellectual challenges posed by the coauthor relationship. As editors and writing consultants, we know that careful, advanced planning and open, formalized communication offer the cure to almost any coauthoring ailment. Here are the most important things to consider:
1. Make sure long-term plans are clear from the start. Each coauthor’s interests may be driven by something very different—an impending review, interest in a particular journal, longstanding research goals, etc. Whether you intend to work together on a series of paper, coauthor one main paper while individuals take on sub-papers, or something else, sketching out long-term plans at the onset of your collaboration will ensure that the goals of everyone on your team are met.
2. Relatedly, make sure the details of authorship and intellectual property are crystal clear. While some fields may dictate specific authorship criteria, others are far looser.[3] And as Fine and Kurdek (1993) note, these decisions can be complicated by issues of seniority and interpersonal clashes. An open and ongoing dialogue about contributions and responsibilities can engender clarity, particularly because the specifics of authorship credit may very likely need to evolve along with the project.
3. Keep a written record of all discussions and agreements. Headaches stemming from misunderstandings and miscommunication can be avoided with clear recordkeeping. This includes not only agreements about authorship, but also deadlines, publication goals, and all other decisions that affect the project.
4. Make use of technology. Tools like Endnote and RefWorks, Word’s “track changes” function, and the cloud’s many data sharing possibilities make the logistics of collaborative work far less challenging than ever before. Find the right tools for your project, and get all your coauthors on board with using them.
5. Clarify the division of labor for the actual writing of the paper. This may depend on various coauthors’ interest in and facility with writing, the agreed-upon terms of authorship, or other factors. Clarifying responsibilities for other process-related issues, which may not seem important at the outset but which can be very time-consuming (such as compiling individually authored sections or handling the actual journal submission), ensures far more efficient work.
6. Use an editors’ trick of the trade and create a style sheet for all of your coauthors to follow. This upfront time investment will ultimately—and exponentially—simplify the process of collating individually authored sections. Once the paper’s content is complete, consider designating the most experienced writer as the paper’s ultimate editor—or, better yet, hire an expert who can suss out inconsistencies and correlate usage, style, organization, and more.
[1] For example, Ginsberg and Miles (2011) and Greene (2007) document these trends in legal and scientific research, respectively.
[2 ]We’re thinking not only about the intellectual benefits and possible advancements to scholarship, but also the way that coauthoring allows individual researchers to gain experience in new areas and take on projects for which they might not otherwise have time. Some even consider coauthorship to be a solution to declining journal acceptance rates).
[3] See, for example, the useful survey of the authorship guidelines of prominent scientific organizations included in a study by Osborne and Holland (2009).
References
Fine, M. & Kurdek, L. (1993). Reflections on determining authorship credit and authorship order on faculty-student collaborations. American Psychologist, 48(11), 1141-1147.
Ginsberg, T. & Miles, T. (2011). Empiricism and the rising incidence of coauthorship in law. University of Illinois Law Review, 2011, 1785-1826.
Greene, M. (2007). The demise of the lone author. Nature, 450 (7173), 1165-1165.
Osborne, J. & Holland, A. (2009). What is authorship, and what should it be? A survey of prominent guidelines for determining authorship in scientific publications. Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 14(15), 1-19.
Let Us Entertain You
Consequently, “analytics,” “visualizations,” and “data stories” (a new narrative genre, according to Stanford researchers) represent our hyperlinked future.
But data has its limits. While its abundance is magnificent, data does not necessarily resonate with readers’ experiences. Data certainly educates, but it seldom motivates.
At MWS, we agree with analytics marketer Daniel Waisberg: people need narrative to synthesize data. Accordingly, we find that simple storytelling is crucial to connecting organizations with their audiences.
However, simple storytelling is not easy to create. This is particularly the case today, as readers are urged to “be suspicious of stories” and are increasingly skeptical of the overt branding storytelling can clumsily deliver.
An organization (whether or not it identifies as brand-driven) can contextualize its data by first explicitly identifying its audience and by then determining the golden ratio between data and narrative appropriate to that audience.
We augment the approach described by Jim Stikeleather (chief innovation officer at Dell). To do this, we consider an audience’s level of expertise on the subject matter and the level of detail with which they’ll likely engage.
For a business report to funders, we might identify our audience as managerial and use accessible success stories to frame data. For internal marketing campaigns, we might identify our audience as expert and create copy from historical research and internal interviews.
While readers want accessible information “in one chart,” our experience and research suggests that big data cannot communicate as compellingly nor motivate as meaningfully as a well-written story. It’s the difference between conveying this point with a chart and telling the story about why data benefits from narrative.
Too Many Writers in the Workroom? Streamline Content with Style Sheets
This is partly due to the team-written nature of corporate documents. When work is brainstormed, planned, drafted, edited, revised, and posted or published by different writers, errors and simple inconsistencies occur. Rectifying such errors is time-consuming but necessary: most readers equate consistency with polish, professionalism, and ultimately, effective branding.
However, a style sheet is not just a reflection of a single document; instead, it’s an easy-to-follow template for all future writing. The style sheet can be transferred across departments so that a writer adding concluding remarks to a drafted client report need only consult the style sheet to determine whether “basis points” should be spelled out or abbreviated as plural.
With assiduous updating, a comprehensive style sheet constitutes an in-house style guide for departments.
Be an Efficient Academic
When we create style sheets here at MWS, we begin with a concise repository of the APA, MLA, Chicago, or target publication’s in-house style rules most pertinent to your manuscript. We follow with an alphabetized list of relevant terminology and usage. Everything from preferred font for headers, to appropriate number usage, to correct deployment of capitalization and acronyms will find a place on the sheet.
The style sheet is not, however, a static reflection of a manuscript; instead, it offers a dynamic template to guide future work. A style sheet is thus especially useful for complex projects, for team-written manuscripts, or for manuscripts affected by a lag between initial drafting and final revision and publication.
Although creating a style sheet necessitates an initial time investment, it saves time when it really matters: rather than tracking down a copy of APA 6 in the hours before submission (only to realize you can only find APA 5), you can simply consult your style sheet and its reference to the heading levels pertinent to your paper.
Make Summer Matter
Summer is around the corner, and with some advanced planning, it can be reinvigorating and productive.
References
Boice, R. (1989). Procrastination, busyness and bingeing. Behavior Research Therapy. 27(6), 605-611.
Boice, R. (2000). Advice for new faculty members: Nihil nimus. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Gray, T. (2010). Publish and flourish: Become a prolific scholar. New Mexico: New Mexico State University
Write Better White Papers
Ineffective white papers usually fail because they don’t grab an audience’s attention or they slip into sales-speak. The title and first sentences must signal that a white paper is interesting, applicable, and offers a significant return on investment. A white paper must also maintain a balanced, informative tone: salesman-like posturing discredits content and alienates readers.