I read in this forum that coauthoring with your advisor might hurt your cv. At the ag/env econ department of my university (in Europe) it is costumary to coauthor all your PhD work with your advisor. Similarly to publishing in the sciences, the order of authorship seems to play an essential role (the PhD student is thus the first author). Is this normal? Does this hurt the future job prospects on the market?
Coauthoring in ag/env econ
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I read in this forum that coauthoring with your advisor might hurt your cv. At the ag/env econ department of my university (in Europe) it is costumary to coauthor all your PhD work with your advisor. Similarly to publishing in the sciences, the order of authorship seems to play an essential role (the PhD student is thus the first author). Is this normal? Does this hurt the future job prospects on the market?
If your job market paper is co-authored with your advisor, that will hurt you tremendously when looking for jobs (in the US market at least -- I don't know foreign job markets as well, but I'd guess that they're similar).
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I disagree with the other comments. I have seen plenty of job market candidates get decent (top100) US jobs with coauthored JMPs. Most advisors will lay out the details of your contribution to any coauthored work in their LoR; it looks good for them to have you placed well, so they actually have incentive to overemphasize your contribution.
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I disagree with the other comments. I have seen plenty of job market candidates get decent (top100) US jobs with coauthored JMPs. Most advisors will lay out the details of your contribution to any coauthored work in their LoR; it looks good for them to have you placed well, so they actually have incentive to overemphasize your contribution.
And you think that we are unable to do the bias correction?
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I disagree with the other comments. I have seen plenty of job market candidates get decent (top100) US jobs with coauthored JMPs. Most advisors will lay out the details of your contribution to any coauthored work in their LoR; it looks good for them to have you placed well, so they actually have incentive to overemphasize your contribution.
And you think that we are unable to do the bias correction?Its also usually pretty clear from the interview whether the student knows what he/she is talking about.
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the quality of your dissertation and your advisor (in terms of research, at least his connection in academia) will dominate everything else.
It is good you have a single author paper in a so so journal, but it is always better to have a paper in a decent journal even though there are other names other your name in the author list.
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It is good you have a single author paper in a so so journal, but it is always better to have a paper in a decent journal even though there are other names other your name in the author list.
Sad but true. It is easier to get a sole-authored paper in ERE than a co-authored paper in JEEM.
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Why is this sad? I view that as a good sign – overall paper quality is worth more than solo authorship, as it should be.
It is good you have a single author paper in a so so journal, but it is always better to have a paper in a decent journal even though there are other names other your name in the author list.
Sad but true. It is easier to get a sole-authored paper in ERE than a co-authored paper in JEEM. -
It seems that a coauthored JMP would be a noisy signal on the US job market that should be explained very clearly by my advisor.
No. It's not a "noisy signal." It's an unambiguously negative signal.
To be clear here, co-authoring with your advisor is fine (and can often be a good idea), but only after you've established that you can write good papers on your own. If your job market paper is co-authored with your advisor, the signal you're sending is "I can't write a good paper on my own." No one wants to hire someone like that.
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If your job market paper is co-authored with your advisor, the signal you're sending is "I can't write a good paper on my own." No one wants to hire someone like that.
At a lot of really low-ranked places, assistant professors are basically RAs for senior faculty. A place like that is happy to hire someone with a co-authored JMP. I'd never want a job like that, but some people do. And if that's what you want, it's fine to co-author your JMP.
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OP here. Thanks again for the candid responses. I have the impression that the "rules" of authorship are very different from university to university (at least for ag/env econ in Europe). I co-authored two articles (as a first author) that are published in decent field journals (at the level of ERE, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, REE) in which I really did most of the work (research idea, execution and writing; my advisor read the draft and discussed the ideas with me). This seems to be normal in this part of Europe. Thanks to this forum, I am aware of the importance of the JMP. Now, I still have 2-3 years of funding and would like to focus on "bigger ideas" for the JMP. Due to the system, it is however very likely to be co-authored. I do not want to complain about the system: it is what it is with its pros and cons. I do wonder what the best strategy is for pursuing an academic carreer in this particular case. Should I go directly to the market at the end of my PhD or should I search for a Post Doc first in order to first-author several articles?