Successfully co-authoring for eleven years!

My good colleague and friend, Anna Korteweg and I have been co-authoring articles (and a book!) for over a decade. Here are some tips on how to have a successful co-authorship.

I met Anna in my last year as a PhD student at the University of Toronto. I was about to defend my dissertation, and she was a new hire from Berkeley at the sociology department of University of Toronto. One of our senior professors, legendary Charles Jones, figured out that we have similar interests in research topics, and he suggested that we should meet. Anna and I met over coffee, and we had a lot to talk about: sociology, politics, Muslims in Europe, racism, gender… Soon, Anna wrote an amazing Chapter “The Murder of Theo van Gogh: Gender, religion, and the struggle over immigrant integration in the Netherlands” for my edited book, Migration, Citizenship, Ethos (Palgrave 2006, with M. Bodemann). Right after we co-authored the highly cited article, “Citizenship and immigration: Multiculturalism, assimilation, and challenges to the nation-state” (Annual Review of Sociology, 2008, with Irene Bloemraad), while three of us were living in three different countries. Our co-authorship continued with numerous articles and a book, essays, co-presented conference papers, co-applied grants and so on. Although I co-authored with other people in the past, none of my co-authorships last as long as this one, and none of them were so fruitful. In this essay, I wanted to give five tips on how Anna and I worked over a decade:

1. Meet regularly in person: There is an ocean dividing our co-authorship. We live in different time zones. We both have families, and demanding jobs (Anna was the department chair for two terms! I am the director of an Institute with nineteen sub-departments). But we meet regularly in person. Most of the time Anna flies to Europe, and we take writing treats before or after conferences, or in Berlin. When the semester is going on, we have very little time for writing. So we try to visit each other and fully concentrate on our writing outside the semester. Meeting regularly in person (like every few months) helps us to reconnect, talk and exchange new ideas while working on a co-authored article.
2. Be generous: Whoever has the resources at that time, grant or budget, chips in for conference stays, plane tickets, hiring of assistants for data collection, translation of our co-authored work and so on. We have never made a separate budget or counted pennies, we have always been generous to each other in terms of finances. The same is true for time, whoever has time starts writing and then swap the article so that the other one has the chance to write. At certain periods, we are both swamped with work, then the other author gives her time. We never put each other under pressure for work, and never resent each other for putting more or less work during a period of time. We know at the end we can always ask for an extension from the editors.
3. Let the ideas flow: We actually have different ways of working. Anna takes the article as a whole and creates a red tape to hold the concepts together. I like to take a section, and deepen the concepts and events. Anna is an amazing editor, I have hundreds of pages with Anna’s handwriting on the margins which she edited our articles. I am a library addict, I bring new books, readings, references to our articles. Our work is complementary with each other. We do not curb each other’s appetite to work, but we encourage it. Even though we do not agree with each other, we still give the chance to the other one to integrate it into the text and see how it works. Letting each other’s ideas flow and being experimental with the text is key to co-authorship.
4. Be reliable: This is a very important part, which developed in long years of co-authorship. We trust each other that the other one will do the work, maybe a little later than the deadline. We always reply to each other’s emails, even a short sentence. Although we are in two different ends of the world, I know that Anna will do the work, and she knows that I will do it. Being able to rely on each other makes sure that the work gets done. Another way of being reliable to always making sure that the co-author’s name is in there when someone is invited for a lecture or conference. We cannot always attend conferences that one of us is attending. We always make sure that other person’s name is mentioned, and even (more recently) we started using a common photo (see above), and we used a made-up name for our co-authorship in our power point slides: Gokcanna Kortekul (we are full professors, we can be silly in conferences, and noone minds anymore :-)
5. Take turns on doing the tedious work: Over the years, we created a system that we take turns on doing the tedious work, i.e. letters to the editor, follow up on revise and resubmits etc, and also whose name will come first in the articles. By taking turns, we make sure that we have access to editorial networks, use our time efficiently (while one is working on one article, the other one works on another one, and then we swap), and each of us gets to be the first author.

In sum, Anna and I started to co-author articles as colleagues in mid-2000s, over years, we stayed in numerous cities in Europe and North America for writing retreats, met amazing colleagues who gave feedback to our work, worked with highly gifted assistants and students, spent hot summer days in offices reading and analyzing data, raised three kids in total, ran departments and Institutes and by the way we also co-authored numerous articles and a book! Our colleagial relationship turned into a life-long friendship. We both agree that we share the same brain on two sides of the ocean.