The I-O Ethicist
Bill Macey
Ethics Panel Members: Jerry Greenberg, Dan Ilgen, Rick Jacobs*, Dick Jeanneret*, Deirdre Knapp, Joel Lefkowitz*, Rodney L. Lowman*, Robert McIntyre*, Lois Tetrick, Nancy Tippins, Walt Tornow, Vicki Vandaveer
(*Responded with name)
Last issue, we described SIOPs efforts to launch a new TIP column to provide support to its members for the ethical practice of I-O psychology. Our goal is to provide a forum for discussing the varying facets of ethical questions by responding to dilemmas presented by SIOP members. As described in that article and repeated further below, weve provided a mechanism for members to bring forth confidential inquiries. Our process calls for some or all of our panel members to respond with their views. Because of publication lags, weve only just received our first opportunity to respond. So, whether this column is representative of what to expect in the future is yet to be determined. Our first inquiry, then, is as follows:
The Dilemma
I am an I-O psychology professor affiliated with a doctoral program. Most of our program graduates pursue nonacademic careers. Given that they arent under the publication pressure associated with an academic career path, I often find it challenging to motivate students to publish their thesis and/or dissertation data. Many times these are projects that I have worked very closely with students on, and sometimes they are piece of a larger project Im doing. On projects where I would legitimately be a co-author, my productivity takes a hit when students dont want to publish our joint work. I guess Id just like some advice on what my options are. For their own professional development, my first choice is to encourage students to take the lead. When its a thesis, their proximity and our continuing working relationship can often give me adequate time and leverage to get them to submit their work. However, the problem is really bad for the dissertation work of students who go on to pursue applied careers. To date, I have chaired several dissertations and none of them have subsequently been submitted for publication, even though theyre publishable studies in my estimation. Whats an ethical course of action under these circumstances. Should I take full responsibility for getting the work published but let the student retain first author status because its their thesis or dissertation? Should I tell the student (or even create a contract stating) that they have a certain amount of time to pursue publication (e.g., one year) and that if they dont I will take over as first author?
Some Added Context
A rather spirited e-mail exchange ensued among our columnists. One helped frame the discussion:
The author of the question is struggling with an emotionally charged issue. First, there is a pressure to disseminate knowledge. Second, there is the apparent lack of interest by students in such dissemination because of career targets that apparently do not reinforce dissemination of knowledge. Third, there is a feeling of inequity within us disseminators.The university professor must invest an enormous amount of time in the student, shaping the ideas, clarifying the methods,etc. Yet, the professor is unfairly expected to take second fiddle to first fiddler who can barely negotiate the instrument.
Another of our columnists noted the reality of the pressure, commenting that in his/her experience, promotion and retention decisions may very well depend on the order of authorship, adding What we do learn once more is that ethical behavior is shaped by many sources and has many underlying motives. Importantly, whether such forces are typical is considered by some of the panel to be debatable.
A Preliminary View and Some References
Pressure or not, one of our panel members offered some pretty clear-cut advice, saying:
Although the question raised isnt unique to I-O, were in a good position to help our colleague with his or her inquiry. Fortunately, this appears to be a relatively straightforward matter on which the APA Publication Manual (5/e) provides clear guidance. At the top of p. 396, it says, A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored article that is substantially based on the students dissertation or thesis.
Assuming that the student was actively in conducting his or her own research and that he or she wrote a thesis or dissertation based on this research, then the professor should take second authorship on the journal article based on this workeven if the professor was primarily responsible for the preparation of that article.
For more insight into the issue of authorship on publications involving students, I refer readers to the following article:
Fine, M. A., & Kurdek, L. (1993). Reflections on determining authorship credit and authorship order on faculty-student collaborations.
American Psychologist, 48, 11411147.
Providing an additional point of reference, one of our panel members quoted from sections 8.12b and 8.12c of the
Ethical Standards as follows:
(8.12b) Principal authorship and other publication credits accurately reflect the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their relative status. Mere possession of an institutional position, such as department chair, does not justify authorship credit. Minor contributions to the research or to the writing for publications are acknowledged appropriately, such as in footnotes or in an introductory statement.
(8.12c) Except under exceptional circumstances, a student is listed as principal author on any multiple-authored article that is substantially based on the students doctoral dissertation. Faculty advisors discuss publication credit with students as early as feasible and throughout the research and publication process as appropriate. (See also Standard 8.12b, Publication Credit.)
Searching for the Exceptional Circumstance and a Tentative Recommendation
Can there be differences of opinion here? As the groups views emerged, there was some discussion regarding levels of contribution, and whether exceptions can be defined in terms of the level of support students require regarding the formulation of questions, research methods, analysis, and so on. The debate continued to evolve, and the positions taken as this article was prepared became increasingly less equivocal. As one panel member opined very early on:
Assuming that the student has, in fact, done sufficient independent work on the dissertation to genuinely warrant the degreethen he/she is the first author on any publication regardless of whether the study was derived from the faculty members research program, whether the faculty member took a relatively active role in guidance, and whether the faculty member even writes the first draft of the manuscript for publication.
Yet another added:
I believe that the inquirer needs to get comfortable with doing a lot of the journal work for a publication and being the second author. It happens a lot. If it is part of a larger project the issue is less pressing as presumably there will be opportunities for the professor to be first author. I too agree that if it is a written version of the students thesis or dissertation, it should be first author for the student, second for the faculty member, regardless of who does the writing or who had the initial idea.
Approaching apparent consensus, one of us wrote: Our collective wisdom and official guidelines converge on a course of action: take second authorship. However, this is not as absolute as it might seem; this same panel member made it explicit that there is no compelling evidence suggested in the original inquiry to imply
exceptional circumstances. So, there is room to establish a dialectic, as one of our group also says:
In our present case, a student is not interested in publishing a dissertation or working on it due to the professional practice career where publications dont count. Is this an exceptional circumstance? I guess that is the ultimate question presented for us...I believe that it may not be quite as simple as NO. I believe that it depends on the contract between the student and professor; it depends on the degree to which agreed upon intermediate goals are regularly being met; and it depends on whether the professor and former student agree on the change of order of authorship; once discussed.
So, our panelists may only agree that a completely definitive answer isnt possible because of the latitude in the term exceptional. Maybe this is not surprising given as one put it: the different guidelines themselves do not converge. Nonetheless, one of our panel members suggested some further thoughts about what might constitute such an exception:
(a) The new graduate of the doctoral program leaves the program after handing in the dissertation to the Dean. She says her perfunctory good-byes and is never heard from again. This being so, in spite of the fact that the major professors repeated requests for her help in cutting the introduction, redoing an analysis or two, or assisting in submitting the final manuscript.
(b) The new graduate of the program leaves the program In reviewing the data, the major professor discovers HUGE errors in the data analysis. The student refuses to help in the redo of the analyses because he is now a practicing professional.
(c) The new graduate, having agreed to carrying out the development of the first draft of the dissertation redaction, fails to follow through on her contract. The dissertation accumulates dust mites for months, years,These are examples of arguably exceptional circumstances.
Contracting Issues
Explicit in the above comments and our e-mail exchanges was the importance of appropriate contracting between student and professor. One of our group put it this way:
In addition to this being an ethical issue, it is also very much a relationship issue. If the professor and student have built a mutually respectful and collaborative, professional relationship...they should be able to have a problem-solving conversation about how to make publication happen (meeting the profs needs) so that it requires little to no time/effort on the part of the student (meeting the students needs). Most of us want to help those who have really helped us
succeedand who have made us feel truly valued and successful.
The scenario then might be...
- The Professor writes and submits the article and handles all the rewrite.
- The student is first author (may or may not choose to participate in the rewriting of the dissertation).
- At least the prof gets more second-author publications that contribute to his/her larger body of work.
Id definitely advise against creating a contract with a takeover as first author after a time certain provision. This coercive influence tactic will not be effective and will likely have problematic unintended consequences, including potentially discouraging future students from working with that professor.
Program Issues
Finally, one of our panel members noted that the inquiry raises questions of a further sort:
Although this takes the question a bit beyond the ethics issues alone, the context in which these dissertations are being supervised is also relevant. If the universitys I-O program is one that purports to be producing scientist-practitioners, consideration needs to be given to the outcome measure implicit in the finding that its doctoral graduates are not adding to the published literature, at least not with their dissertation products. If a program is intending to produce scientists or scientist-practitioners but the programs graduates are in fact not contributing to the scientific or scientist-practitioner literature, then the effectiveness of the program on that dimension at least needs examination.
Moving Forward
Hopefully weve been successful in creating a dialog about an issue that may concern many of our members. The approach taken in responding to this inquiry may or may not serve as the model for how we will respond to future inquiries. Thus, we expect to continue to experiment with the column. If you have comments or thoughts about how were doing, please e-mail us at
wmacey@pra-inc.com.
How to Submit
Submit your question in writing to The I-O Ethicist, SIOP Administrative Office, 520 Ordway Ave., PO Box 87, Bowling Green OH 43402. Alternatively, you may submit your questions on the SIOP Web site at
www.siop.org. Please note that your submissions and correspondence will be treated in strict confidence and will be completely anonymous.
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