An academic obligation or an academic favour : debunking a mystified notion

Abstract

Substantial national attention is being directed at enhancing the competency levels of early careerist in academia and other areas of employment. Higher education’s climate demands increasing levels of written output from academics which puts pressure on supervisors to want to publish with or from students’ doctoral thesis as lead or co-authors. The prospects of this emanate from the well-known adage of “Publish or perish”. Supervisors, in their need to publish themselves, may consider that their names be included in the listing of authors on all publications from the students’ theses or dissertations. Many scholars would argue that publishing with your graduate student is ethical if you have written or edited the manuscript whereas others hold the opinion that supervision of the research project without actually writing or editing a manuscript is sufficient to warrant inclusion as an author. A third situation arises when a student does not attempt to publish his/her thesis or dissertation. To many faculties, this seems a loss of their efforts spent guiding the student. Some faculty even believe that if the student doesn’t publish his/her research within a specified period of time, the supervising faculty has the right to publish the research as primary author. The purpose of this presentation is to raise a debate on graduate research supervision and joint student-supervisor authorship. I propose the position that publishing with graduate students should not be seen as payback time for the supervisory role and recommend that students’ plans for publication be discussed early in the supervisory process with agreed upon roles in manuscript preparation be clearly delineated and agreed up. In so doing, I will address a debatable issue which is emerging in most universities about supervision and mentoring in graduate studies.