In an editorial titled "Negotiating Authorship for Doctoral Dissertation Publications" published in the January 2009 issue of Qualitative Health Research, Janice Morse wrote, "[T]he only single-authored work from a dissertation should be the instance in which it was the student's own work. The student would have had to identify a question, write the proposal, conduct the research, and write and defend the dissertation without the committee making any changes to the work. This is possible, and has happened, but it is not the norm" (Morse, 2009, p. 3). Morse added that she jointly writes articles with students in "the mandatory weeks after the student submits his or her dissertation to the committee prior to the defense," and said that she now "usually handle[s] the correspondence regarding the article." My purpose in responding to this editorial is neither to endorse nor to decry the practices Morse described. It is to place the authorship questions Morse raised in the broader context of changing institutional and professional reward structures. I suggest that qualitative researchers have particular stakes in the debates that pressures for certain kinds of productivity are generating that are different from the ones Morse described.
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