Most academic work is dine in team, including writing.

Below are tips on how to hold effective team meetings and how to give effective feedback on draft texts.

Regular meetings help with collaborative writing. In your team, identify the following roles:

Convenor: will contact all team members to build consensus on how often the team should meet; then finds meeting times; sends out calendar invites and video links for virtual meetings. 

Recommended frequency: hold meetings once a month, increase frequency during editing phase closer to submission deadline

Chair: sets agenda for each meeting; facilitates meetings; scaffolds peer feedback by providing guiding questions (see feedback tools below; slide decks under the Workshop tab)

Reminder: helps team members stay on track by sending reminders, encouraging messages, and feedback.

Recommended frequency: send messages once a week

Feedback pairs. In your writing group, use the technique described in this YouTube video by John Spencer (2:20 minutes). This technique requires 20 minutes, 10 minutes per author receiving feedback.

Myriad messages. Answer the following four questions about what you just read and share your answers with the author: (1) What were you curious about?  (2) What did you push back against? (3) What messages did you take from it?  (4) Anything else?  This technique requires 3 to 5 minutes per author receiving feedback.

Just 2 questions. After you read a peer's writing, complete the following two questions and share the questions with the author: "Is the main point of your story ...?" and "Have you thought about ...?"  The first question may only be answered by the author saying either "Yes" or "no", nothing else. The second question should lead to a conversation between reader and author. This technique requires 1 to 3 minutes author receiving feedback.

You can find more information on the page Authorship.

Below are some resources to help you navigate who should be a coauthor

1. Advice reflecting common academic practices

   • General guidelines for authorship contributions by the National Institute of Health

   • CRediT Guidelines (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) 

   • COPE authorship guidelines (Committee on Publication Ethics)

   • Authorship in ecology: attribution, accountability, and responsibility (published in 2006 by Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment)

2. Advice reflecting the need for more equitable academic practices

   • How CRediT helps shift from authorship to contributorship (journal article)

   • The Ecological Society of America offers guidelines on collaborations with Traditional Ecological Knowledge experts

   • Goals, challenges, and next steps in transdisciplinary fisheries research: perspectives and experiences from early-career researchers (published in 2023 by Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries)

   • Contemporary authorship guidelines fail to recognize diverse contributions in conservation science research (published in 2021 by the British Ecological Society)