How does collaboration work?

[Grinner]

I'm currently noodling away on a project in my spare time which might have some scientific or technological merit. Whilst explaining some of the project's difficulties to a friend today, he presented a stroke of insight which could prove useful. Not critically useful, just a definite improvement on my previous methods. Now I have to consider the decorum around this sort of thing. Should I list him as a collaborator if I ever go public? If money ever results, is he due a chunk of it? How do actual scientists handle this sort of scenario?

[Eldan]

In a thesis, you'd list a thing such as that under "special thanks to" on the last page.

[NichG]

I'm currently noodling away on a project in my spare time which might have some scientific or technological merit. Whilst explaining some of the project's difficulties to a friend today, he presented a stroke of insight which could prove useful. Not critically useful, just a definite improvement on my previous methods. Now I have to consider the decorum around this sort of thing. Should I list him as a collaborator if I ever go public? If money ever results, is he due a chunk of it? How do actual scientists handle this sort of scenario?

Some scientists are picky about what constitutes a minimum contribution for co-authorship (generally they're concerned about maintaining the quality of publication metrics, because a lot of the scientific hiring and career structure relies on people not cheating that system too badly). Others are picky about making sure that someone is not excluded if there is any reason or suspicion that they might have contributed something to the work (generally they're concerned about not alienating or offending colleagues by accident, and they expect their colleagues generally behave honestly and won't accept a co-authorship if its not justified). There are good points to both views, and a lot ends up depending on the culture of the field, institute, and research group.

Okay, thats not so helpful perhaps. Concrete advice would be:

- Acknowledgements are free. Do this by default no matter what, with the rare exception that your friend is someone famous and people might put their name in the acknowledgements as a way to try to use their reputation to get the paper taken more seriously.

- Co-authorship is cheap in the grand scheme of things. There are very few single-author papers outside of mathematics, and they tend to be very different in scope than other papers in a given field. So going from one author to two won't really hurt you at all. First and/or last and/or corresponding authorships are more important (again, field dependent), as there's basically a hidden convention that people in each field use to know who was the advisor, who was the student, who was the random labmate who helped debug the code or optimize some function, who was the partner in another lab entirely who provided some data, etc. So, don't be stingy.

- For co-authorship: Ask them 'do you think you should be an author of this?' if you aren't sure they should be but want to be careful. Alternately, if you think they should be and want to push them a bit in that direction, you can ask 'do you want to be an author of this?' instead.

- Be clear about whether co-authorship comes with additional expectations (editing drafts), or if you want to specifically exclude certain usual authorship considerations (for example, you might say 'I'll include you as co-author if you like, but I'm going to retain edit and submission control because we're on a deadline/I have a certain plan for these papers that I need to stick to/etc'). Generally a co-author would expect to be apprised of changes to drafts before submission, things like that, but the realities of things mean that often you have to submit by X date in order to meet your requirements for a particular followup grant submission or performance evaluation or whatever, but one of your 6 co-authors is on vacation in Tahiti with no internet or there's an illness in their family or ... So its good to be clear about things like this before adding someone as a co-author. Generally I would be careful about having >3 'core' authors who are part of every round of edits or things will just collapse into a morass of nothing getting done.

I've never dealt with a situation where splitting incomes from research was on the line, but my general feeling is that if I were having a friendly conversation with another researcher, and I volunteer some idea or make some comment, I wouldn't expect to be able to claim any money that came out of that. I would vaguely anticipate some kind of attribution if it turned out to be a big deal for them, but along the lines of an acknowledgement rather than authorship, and I wouldn't really be too put out if they didn't include an acknowledgements. That said, once or twice I've received co-authorships for things I thought were entirely trivial, but they weren't at all trivial to the other researchers.

[Chen]

I'm currently noodling away on a project in my spare time which might have some scientific or technological merit. Whilst explaining some of the project's difficulties to a friend today, he presented a stroke of insight which could prove useful. Not critically useful, just a definite improvement on my previous methods. Now I have to consider the decorum around this sort of thing. Should I list him as a collaborator if I ever go public? If money ever results, is he due a chunk of it? How do actual scientists handle this sort of scenario?

I'd think it would depend on the amount of effort put in. If your friend said something like "why don't you try X instead?" and it ended up working, I wouldn't consider much of it at all. If they laid out a full procedure/plan on how to do something, well then they're probably more involved and deserve some more acknowledgement.

[Grinner]

Alright. Thanks for the opinions.

I'll definitely give an acknowledgement where appropriate if I end up pursuing his method, although perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that I'm actually preparing an entry for a competition. Depending on whether I place or not, I may have the opportunity to publish the results as original research.