Guidelines for Authorship Credit, Order, and Co-Inquirer Learning in Collaborative Faculty-Student SoTL Projects

Abstract

Determining authorship credit and order in collaborative research projects can be difficult, can introduce or increase conflict in the research environment, and can exacerbate existing inequalities and affect power dynamics between team members. As a result, much disciplinary scholarship has been written to develop potential guidelines for authorship credit and order. However, the collaborative interdisciplinary nature of much SoTL work, along with the increasing focus of SoTL on students as co-inquirers into SoTL research, creates unique issues and challenges in ethically assigning authorship credit on SoTL projects. Informed by seminal disciplinary papers on authorship issues and best practices in undergraduate research, this paper proposes a new model to identify the relative contributions of student collaborators and explicitly incorporate a process-focused approach to collaborative faculty-student SoTL projects.