PhD students publish without supervisors – how does it work? In my field (experimental physics) the supervision of PhD students works roughly like that: freshmen come to the lab, they are given tasks, then they do experiments, discuss the results with their supervisors, do more experiments, discuss more, and then at some point they start writing papers about their results. There, of course, both PhD students and their supervisors are co-authors on papers, often together with other internal and/or external collaborators.
I've been working in a few countries, and the system was always more or less like that. I do understand why it is functioning this way: in a relatively complicated field of knowledge, a new PhD student is absolutely incapable of writing a paper which would stand up to the standards of the respective scientific community. So the student gets supervision as to which experiments are interesting to do and which not, how to do the experiments, how to analyze results, how to present them, etc. In return, the supervisor, at the very minimum, publishes a paper and gets the work done (and published), as it was described in the funding proposal from which this PhD student is paid. I mean, it is not usually referred to as a deal between a student and a supervisor, but if everything goes well it's a win-win for sure, and it's all pretty obvious, so I am not even sure whether I should have written it in so much detail.
However, surfing through Academia SE, I found a number of questions from PhD students about whether they should publish papers without their supervisors, and, surprisingly, a significant number of answers encouraging them to do so, in the spirit of: “It’s your PhD, how are you supposed to work independently if you can’t publish a paper on your own”. From this I conclude that there are at least some places where this is indeed how the system works, so PhD students publish papers without their supervisors as co-authors. And so, I wonder: How is this system supposed to work long-term? What would be the motivation for supervisors to actually accept and supervise students, if they don't even get a publication from this student's work? Supervision, if done properly, takes quite some time, so as a research scientist, I'd rather spend this time on my own work which will be published under my name, rather then help other people publish their papers.
I can foresee an answer that goes like, it is a sort of moral obligation of a scientist to &quot;raise&quot; PhD students, and he or she should not expect anything &quot;in return&quot;, not even a publication. Although some people might indeed share this belief, it would be very naive to build the entire system on moral grounds, so I am sure there is something else.
Update. I would like to quote @AlexanderWoo: &quot;Mathematics is weird is that standards for authorship usually differs in an advisor-student context than outside of one. There are definitely contributions that would merit coauthorship if one were not the advisor of the other author but does not if one is the advisor.&quot; Sounds bizarre but again, what do I know.
I published two single-author journal articles during my PhD in a field where a PhD student publishing without their supervisor is uncommon. So uncommon, in fact, that I can't think of any other examples in my subfield.
My case is probably unusual in that by a few years into my project, I was far more of an expert in the subject than my supervisor. My former supervisor is a bit of a generalist, so this is not unusual for them. At a certain point during my PhD I started disagreeing strongly with my supervisor about what to do, which is when I started working more independently.
I actually would have been offended if I were required to put my supervisor's name on either paper, as they had negligible intellectual contributions to the papers and were even harmful to them in my opinion. My supervisor made it quite clear that the work was my own, and even stated so during my defense. (They already had tenure so I don't think they needed their name on the papers, though this could be a factor in other cases.)
From my own experience I can say there are advantages and disadvantages to publishing without one's supervisor as a PhD student.
Some researchers will have greater respect for a student who has published independently. I've been pleasantly surprised to be treated as an authority on certain subjects during my PhD. I admit that those people might just be nice all around, but I didn't see most students getting that sort of treatment.
Unfortunately there are people who are suspicious of more independent students. One reviewer brought up the fact that I was a PhD student publishing without my supervisor in their review, as if such a thing were something to be suspicious of. They did not elaborate about what they found suspicious, but in my response I wrote that they are welcome to ask the editor to contact my supervisor if they believe I had not credited others sufficiently. I've also been warned to emphasize successful collaborative work on my CV and cover letters when applying to jobs, as some people will assume that I'm hard to get along with if I work independently too much.
I personally prefer to work more independently. I think the current research environment incentivizes collaboration far too much. I see a lot of groupthink/lowest commmon denominator type thinking in much of heavily collaborative work. Good ideas are avoided too often simply because they are unfamiliar to most people whose approval is needed. Good research often comes from unfamiliarity.
That's not to say that collaboration is often bad, just that it's too often bad. I fully agree that certain projects are impossible without collaboration. But given the choice, I'd bias my own work towards what an individual can handle, which I think is more than most believe.