How to politely tell a colleague they won't be an author of my article? Looking for advice.
My coworkers and I have been working on a project for about two years, and we are right now in the process of writing a paper. About a year ago, we contacted a friend of mine who is also a researcher, told him about our results and asked for his insight. After a couple of zoom calls, he pointed us toward a research direction we had not thought about. After pursuing this direction for some time we found out it did not work, so we ended up doing something different which does not include our colleague’s suggestions at all.
Now, after discussing with the coauthors we have concluded that it is not fair for any of us to include this person as an author, since his contribution has been of no impact for the paper in the end. I agree with this decision. I also believe it would not be nice for our colleague to just find the paper online without any news, and especially since he is my/our friend I feel that I should send him the manuscript via email before sending it for publication. I wonder how I should I deal with the issue of authorship in this email: should I just send him the paper without him as an author? if so, should I explain to him that we do not think his contribution deserves it? or should I ask if he wants to be one? I am not familiar with the authorship etiquette…
Thanks in advance for your advice!
TLDR: Unless explicitly discussed otherwise, your friend does not expect to be a co-author. Just write a friendly email thanking them for the discussions and asking them if it is ok to include them in the acknowledgements.
As pointed out in the comments, this highly depends on which field we're talking about. In some fields, even pointing in a direction that actually turned out to be right might only be worth an acknowledgement (probably specific though, &quot;we thank X for point to the results published in &lt;obscure jounal 60 years ago&gt;&quot;). Since this is clear to most people, based on the information you provided, I would not think that your friend even expects to be co-author at all (unless they explicitly asked to be co-author, which would be border-line in terms of academic integrity but happens when the person urgently needs another co-authorship for formal reasons - in that case, however, one would expect that person to (a) communicate this clearly beforehand and (b) do much of the mindless busy-work, e.g. beautification of images).
That being said, I would assume that your friend knows they're not going to be co-author and thank them by email for the interesting, albeit ultimately fruitless discussions (but hey, maybe we can explore this in the future,...) and ask them if they agree to be mentioned in the acknowledgements. In other words, put a positive spin on it.