Many lead authors will have experienced the situation where they invite colleagues to be co-authors on a paper because of their expertise and the contribution they could make, only to find these co-authors do little or nothing to help with the hard work of structuring, drafting and revising the manuscript and responding to the comments of editors and reviewers. An obvious solution is to simply remove such people from the author list, but this can be risky and difficult for all sorts of reasons. I would be very interested to hear of your experiences of what works and what doesn't work by way of trying to get the best out of your co-authors.

Similar questions and discussions