I have experience collaborating with both senior colleagues and another grad student. Since almost all of the things said about co-authoring with a senior/junior combination have been said very eloquently, I won’t add anything except to say that through co-authoring with senior colleagues, it has been a great way to enhance a sociology network.

OW highlights some of the problems that can come about with a junior/senior co-authoring relationship that can be problematic. I wanted to highlight a couple of areas where working with other grad students can lead to issues as well. The largest one comes about with issues of professional advancement. Because grad students (especially advanced grad students who are looking at the market in the relatively near future) both have a great deal at stake for authoring papers. This means that there is no clear division of who would benefit more or less from the project. “The most important thing is to talk overtly in advance about [this]” (h/t OW, I thought it required emphasizing again).

This conversation can be much more tricky with grad student colleagues (and, I imagine junior faculty - though at this point I can only dream of being one and therefore have no direct experience). There isn’t the opportunity for a teaching moment and, more likely than not, you are working with a friend when engaging in the project. It can be painful to talk about, but it is much better to do it–and do it early–than it is to just assume.

One of the ways that I have worked with my colleague is that we have conceived of this as a larger project in which we are hoping to produce several papers. We actually wrote a grant for this project together which helped us talk out some of the issues OW discussed in the process of writing the grant and in the grant application we actually proposed several analyses, each roughly corresponding to a paper. This is not always a possibility (things like dissertations get in the way — but there is nothing to stop collaboration once both of you defend), but it has been a great way for us to conceive of our writing and (I think) end up with a more equitable solution.