Co-authorship by PhD students and their supervisors: implications for translation studies

Research in the Arts and Humanities, including Translation Studies, has tended to follow a lone researcher model. As the research landscape changes, however, co-authoring is coming more to the fore. This poses particular challenges when PhD students and their supervisors contemplate co-authorship, because of the power imbalance inherent in the supervisory relationship. This article reports on a research project that explores attitudes of PhD students and supervisors to co-authorship. The survey is cross-disciplinary, but we argue that the question is an important one, which has hitherto received very little attention from Translation Studies scholars and deserves both more focused research and inclusion in doctoral training curricula. Overall, participants reported a positive experience, yet identified underutilised opportunities for co-authorship, a lack of clear guidelines regarding roles and expectations, and no shared understanding that supervisors should be automatically included as first authors or co-authors in PhD publications.