Question for academics: need a reality check

[daisyd]

Five of us from different academic institutions wrote a review paper that's come back for edits. I'm the first author. We wrote the paper over the course of 5-6 months. The senior author had trouble with getting other authors to contribute throughout the writing process. Once the paper came back for edits, the senior author attempted to call a meeting with all authors but there was no response. The senior author then said I had to complete the edits as I was the first author and that I could assign edits to other authors as I saw fit and that her role was to "shepherd me through the process".

I've done the first pass of edits which were significant. In my mind the senior author should be following up with other authors to complete edits on their sections and not ask me to follow up with others. Does this sound right? Please set me right if not.

[gatorsmom]

I don’t know anything about teams writing a review paper and how to appropriately assign different levels of responsibility. My thought goes to- whose name shows up first on the paper as the primary contributor? That person should be responsible for following up with the other authors. And ftr, if an author didn’t respond to my requests for information, I’d let them know that their contributions would be removed completely. Either do a thorough job, or don’t bother at all. But I’m impatient like that.

[jent]

Five of us from different academic institutions wrote a review paper that's come back for edits. I'm the first author. We wrote the paper over the course of 5-6 months. The senior author had trouble with getting other authors to contribute throughout the writing process. Once the paper came back for edits, the senior author attempted to call a meeting with all authors but there was no response. The senior author then said I had to complete the edits as I was the first author and that I could assign edits to other authors as I saw fit and that her role was to "shepherd me through the process".

I've done the first pass of edits which were significant. In my mind the senior author should be following up with other authors to complete edits on their sections and not ask me to follow up with others. Does this sound right? Please set me right if not.

I'm an MD and have done some academic writing. The review papers I've done have been small (2-3 authors) so we did not have that problem. However, I've been a first author on research papers and in my experience, the first author is usually the one to do the bulk of coordinating- either doing the edits themselves, or assigning the edits to others.

Are you on Facebook? There is a group, Academic Research Moms, that is helpful for questions like these!

(PS- I'm really sorry your co-authors have been unresponsive. That's not been my experience and it sounds frustrating! I think a lot of academics take on a lot of projects and are spread pretty thin.)

[daisyd]

Thanks to both of you for weighing in and for the FB recommendation. As first author I've done most of the edits while I was out of office. It's been frustrating that I end up working weekends or when I have time off. I guess that is the life of an academic. I was hoping that the senior author would be more hands on in asking for other authors to jump in. Looks like that's not going to happen. Sigh.

[daisyd]

I think a lot of academics take on a lot of projects and are spread pretty thin.

This is a helpful reminder. I'm trying to be more mindful myself in what I take on.