Heather E. Ormiston, Ph.D. (Indiana University Bloomington)
Jackie Caemmerer, Ph.D. (University of Connecticut)
Panelists: Matt Burns, Ph.D. (University of Florida), Robin Codding, Ph.D. (Northeastern University), and Amanda Sullivan, Ph.D. (University of Minnesota)
Mentoring students’ research projects is often an essential role in the life of a professor. Theses, programmatic milestone projects, and dissertations can demand a lot of your time. Managing your own personal research demands while balancing the needs and opportunities of your students can be a delicate balancing act. Indeed, in a recent survey early career school psychology faculty reported a strong interest in professional development related to research management and providing students’ with research mentorship (Grapin et al., 2021). Thus, we sought the guidance of three tenured professors on the best ways to balance student-led scholarship with your own first-author scholarship. Dr. Matt Burns, Dr. Robin Codding, and Dr. Amanda Sullivan graciously shared their valuable insights.
What are some effective strategies you have found for balancing personal (e.g., first-author) scholarship with student-led scholarship (e.g., theses, programmatic milestone projects, dissertations)?
Burns: Hopefully, there is little difference between personal and student-led scholarship. My most effective strategy is to use a research-team model in which we all work together on our research. My students (everyone I advise or who works for me, plus other interested) and I meet every week or every other week for 1.5 hours with a standing agenda – 1) Check In (Roses and Thorns), 2) Quick Advising Questions, 3) Check in on Papers and Projects, and 4) Talk Research Topic. There have been very few articles in my career that didn’t involve students. I work with students to find a niche in each study that addresses their interest or to add a component to the research to forward their own interests.
Codding: I tend to organize my work around an established research agenda and set of “next questions” that I can be prepared to answer when the occasion arises. I also aim to balance works in submission, data collection, and preparation. I see my mentoring of student work as parallel to my own agenda. If there are a lot of student works in the data collection phase – I may focus more on writing up previously collected data.
Moreover, the topics of student-led scholarship inform my own research agenda so the projects can work in tandem. Rarely is it the case that a student project is in a topic area that is far outside of my own area of expertise. The match between my expertise and student interest is important as a starting point for mentorship when a student enters graduate school but also can be facilitated during the mentoring process. Students usually enter our mentoring relationship with interests that are similar, and, in the first semester of brainstorming, I meet with students every other week to provide guidance and shape their projects into areas that I am most familiar with. Student-led ideas drive the process and I contribute knowledge on what questions might not be answered in their related area of interest and help them locate existing research as a jumping off point.
There is not always a balance within or even across years; rather, sometimes student-led scholarship takes precedence and I adjust my future priorities accordingly.
Sullivan: To me, a program’s related policies and procedures provide important context to any decisions about this, particularly as they pertain to admission, advising culture, and expectations for students’ research requirements. To the extent that these allow for admissions informed by advisor match, support appropriate boundaries, and set expectations for quality of work, it can help reduce burdens on faculty. We don’t have a program culture or policy that requires students do their advisors’ scholarship, so student have autonomy in what they choose for student-led projects to meet their degree requirements. This means I try to admit when there’s clear overlap topically or methodologically between my scholarship and a student’s interests so that I can provide the necessary advising of their work.
I also have to be mindful of what time I set aside for advising, both in terms of meetings and providing feedback, so that it doesn’t eclipse my other responsibilities within the context of a reasonable workload and working hours (I recognize that there’s a certain level of tenure privilege in this). I know I have a tendency to let other people’s projects overshadow my own, so being intentional with how I allocate time for different roles and protecting time for my personal scholarship is crucial.
As a tenured professor, I tend only to engage as a coauthor on student-led scholarship when they express a clear desire for me to do so, I am willing to put in the time and effort to get it to a state where I feel comfortable signing off on it as coauthor, and it fits within my research agenda. I don’t assume that I am entitled to authorship on their projects by virtue of being their advisor. Instead, I try to differentiate for students how my engagement with their projects differs when I am functioning as their advisor versus collaborator.
This occurs within the broader context of research advising where I have conversations with students early in our advising relationship about their goals and preferences. Some people have no interest in publishing, others want to maintain their voice and personal style while completing projects that meet our department and grad school requirements, some just want to get the projects done within the minimum requirements which likely means I would need to be more heavy handed with the process of preparing for submitting to a peer-reviewed journal and that might not be something they or I want. Depending on a students’ goals and interests, I adjust my input accordingly because to me, there’s a difference in advising, for instance on (a) defensible ways to address a particular element of a project within the context of degree requirements and their likely implications for project completion versus dissemination and potential influence within the scholarly community versus (b) what I might suggest as a co-author collaborator. I try to be consistent in being explicit about this with students so that they can make informed decisions. Where students have autonomy in conceptualizing and designing their own work, it’s really important to have conversations about relative contributions and authorship as early as possible so that’s often a feature of my advising conversations early on in projects and throughout to the extent its germane to the decisions students make about their work.
Regardless of the model in place, having conversations about roles, authorship, and ethics are important. I have the APA manual bookmarked on the page defining authorship, something I observed by a former colleague (Thank you, Marley.), and prioritize those conversations with students early and as often as needed. Particularly where students are more independent in conceptualization and design, we’ll have conversations about my potential role as a coauthor as they progress through the project and particularly if they get to a stage of wanting to publish. I find this helpful to minimize misunderstandings and any perceived coercion or exploitation, which I am sensitive to from my own experience as a graduate student. More than once I had to navigate difficult situations with senior scholars making decisions or demanding credit in ways that did not reflect publication standards or professional ethics, and that’s not something I ever want to reproduce with students or other early career scholars I might work with.
How do you make decisions about which student theses or dissertations to submit to peer-reviewed journals?
Burns: It is actually easier to turn a thesis into a manuscript submission. I ask students to format their master’s thesis like a manuscript. When it is finished, we simply revise it and submit it. I encourage students to do a 2-study dissertation, which also makes it easier to submit papers. The question is not “which dissertations should you submit,” but “to what journal should this be submitted?” The only time that I haven’t submitted dissertations was when it was not focused enough to find any specific submissions out of it. Cutting a traditional dissertation to make a manuscript submission is among the most difficult things to do in research. The only times I have not been successful was when we couldn’t find on what the resulting paper should focus.
Codding: My goal is to submit nearly all student-led theses or dissertations for peer-review. My experience has been that sometimes, as a student completes their graduate training and moves into their own professional career, they do not have time to engage in the effort required of peer-reviewed submissions or they do not have workload allocated to such endeavors. That reality is the biggest driver for a thesis or dissertation to not be submitted.
Sullivan: Often, the decision comes down to the likelihood of publication; how much time I anticipate needing for writing/editing and verifying data, analyses, and interpretations; and my likelihood of having the bandwidth to give it the time and attention I’ll feel okay about without having to hold up the timeline for them. I’ll happily advise through the publication process without being a coauthor but my feedback and contributions depend on my agreed upon role.
For early career scholars, their decisions might look very different from mine depending on the expectations and requirements of their positions, as well as their short- and long-term goals. For example, in a position where quantity of pubs is valued, early career scholars might orient their advising and time on personal projects and student-led papers towards whatever gets good enough papers submitted to journals as quickly as possible. Some programs or units also have cultures and policies that require students to use their advisors’ scholarship for their degree requirements, which effectively puts them in more of a supportive/second author role on those projects while advisors provide primary intellectual leadership (e.g., specifying research questions, project conceptualization, methods, etc.). Others might be in positions where supporting students’ scholarship is highly valued, so carving out time to create processes and supports that allow for student-led projects to be easily transitioned to publications would be worthwhile. In general, I encourage folks to consider how scholarship and performance are evaluated in their position and unit because there’s considerable variability in expectations and policy across institutions and roles within them.
Any other comments or suggestions you have regarding navigating your own and students’ publications and scholarly products?
Burns: No student should earn a Ph.D. without publishing research along the way. In my opinion, I’d like to see at least one conceptual paper and one study for each Ph.D. student, even if they are interested in working in an applied setting. I don’t think that I’ve ever had a student graduate with only two publications and I think these are the reasons why-
- The research-team model which makes research more feasible, personally applicable, and the basis for a strong sense of community.
- I try to build a culture of research from Day 1. I tell my students, “if you are getting all As, then you are not doing enough research.” Every activity in which they engage, I ask them to find the research question. Finally, we do social events around research. For example, in school psychology we have SPR at the Bar – every time the new SPR issue comes out, we go to a family-friendly bar, I buy them appetizers (they buy their own drinks), and we talk about the issue. Each student comes prepared to talk about 1 article from the issue – first year students just tell us which article they picked and why, and maybe the IV and DVs. However, second and third-year students should be more critical and more advanced students should present more in depth critical analyses. The entire conversation is casual, low-stress, and fun. I am also a big believer in other social events and organized activities around research such as future-faculty clubs.
- I rely heavily on developmentally appropriate scaffolding. Every study has a student lead, which is usually an advanced student who organizes data collection, helps analyze the data, and shepherds the writing process. First year students will help collect data and might write an abstract, but will be part of the process every step of the way. Second- and third-year students are somewhere in between. They take a little more leadership in studies and write specific sections, but always with support from a more advanced student. Finally, I expect first-year students to present a poster at a national conference in Year 1. Right away, I get students presenting at NASP, APA, or CEC. Year 2, students do a symposium with me. It is a short presentation that is part of a panel and I’m right there to help. Year 3, students present a paper with me or a more advanced student. Finally, Years 4 and beyond they do whatever they want. Students can accelerate this pace if they want and feel comfortable doing so, but they have to at least stay on this progression.
It is all about culture, community, support, and scaffolding.
Codding: I often provide recent personal publications to new students as summer reading, before they enter our doctoral program in the fall as my advisee, which connects their interests to my scholarship area. I don’t spend much time developing non-peer-refereed written products or giving extensive numbers of presentations, both of which may take time away from writing my own or supporting student-led peer-refereed submissions. In addition to participating in idea generation and data collection, I also include students in dissemination activities associated with my personal scholarship – all of which facilitates their own interest in related topics.
When it comes to authorship contributions, which is indirectly related to this conversation, our research team uses a scorecard for determining authorship (https://tipec.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Scorecard-for-Determining-Authorship_APA.pdf) but there are other ways to make this determination as well (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/resources/publishing-tips/giving-credit). Engaging in this exercise helps organize the project along with roles and contributions of research team members.
Sullivan: Don’t shy away from conversations about authorship and ethics. Make them a priority throughout any research process while being cognizant of the vulnerabilities of graduate students, particularly those from minoritized backgrounds, implicit norms and expectations that should be made explicit to early career scholars, and the potential influence toxic norms and behaviors common in higher education that can make trust more challenging to earn.
What has or has not worked for you? Do you have any other questions about this delicate scholarship balance? Please comment below.