When authorship sails away – Stories of the intricacies of academic accreditation

Papers are the currency in academia, they seem to determine our whole career. So, naturally, we try to publish as much as we can, while at the same time trying to produce good science. But sometimes authorship can become tricky, with hard decisions and disappointment. We share author-hard-ship stories here that cover a range of experiences, from being undeservedly excluded over the impression of getting too much credit to our own case that we consider ambiguous to this day.* All stories illustrate one key advice: Talk about authorship as early as possible in a project. This includes defining who is responsible for what, and discussing who is the lead of this project.**

Through the eyes of an undergraduate student: I was part of ManyBabies, an international collaboration project

Guest post by Meghan Mastroberardino, third year undergraduate student in Psychology at Concordia University

So, you think you might want to have a career in psychology? In North America, most people who end up calling themselves psychologists began as undergraduate students in a Bachelor of Psychology program and have then completed a PhD. I am a third year undergraduate student in Psychology at Concordia University. One of the best ways to get a better picture of grad school is to volunteer in a research lab and take part in research projects. I have found that it has been challenging journey but it’s when I joined the Concordia Infant Research Lab and met my supervisor in my second year, Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein, that I felt that maybe psychology really was meant for me. I pushed myself and took on as much responsibility as I could in the lab and for the past year, she and I have worked closely together on a large-scale, pre-registered study called ManyBabies1.

How to stay on top of trends and findings in your field.

Franziska Hartung, PhD

Keeping up with the literature and current issues is challenging. But thanks to different tools you can make this an easier task. The best tool in my experience is Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com). If you don’t have a profile yet, make one today. You can use it to follow colleagues’ publications, track citations of seminal papers, and get recommendations based on your usage or core papers in your field.

If you are interested in the output of a certain lab and they are not active on google scholar, you can use tools like https://www.followthatpage.com to track their publications. This obviously only works for labs that have a frequently updated website.

Twitter is an amazing tool to stay up to date with current discussions and topics in your field. It takes a while until you figure out whom to follow, but it’s worth the investment.

Another useful tool to find…

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