A problem I often encounter is deciding who to invite as co-authors. On one hand, you want to show appreciation to the people that helped you in the process of obtaining your results. On the other hand, generously adding authors will dilute the contribution of the people that made the largest contribution. In this post I would like to sketch a few hypothetical situations in which someone could be a co-author. The main goal here is to provoke some discussion on this subject, and learn about some good practices.

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In science the dilemma of either cooperating or competing is everywhere. The situation is never black or white and depends on the discipline. In this post I will limit myself to the typical small-science group model: one group leader, one or two postdocs and a number – typically between 4 and 6, of PhD students.

Pressure
All the group member are under pressure. PhD students have to finish their thesis in time, with preferably a couple of first-author articles in glossy magazines.

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Among physicists “manager” is not the most popular word, albeit that all group leaders are in fact managers. Why this is the case may be more than a blog post on itself, and I do not intend to write that post. Having quite some manager friends, for example in civil engineering or management consulting, I think there is a lot we can learn from them. One thing is the use of Gantt charts, milestones and go/no-go’s. Often people dislike these methods, a representative response is this post from 2008 on this blog.

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