This article reviews the question what is a substantial contribution to a research project in offensive cyberspace operations that merits co-authorship? Frustrations and conflicts may develop during research projects when researchers with different backgrounds, cultures, research fields and expertise decide to conduct research and produce and publish those results. The focus of this paper is a research project in cyberspace operations while taking into account the power-dynamics inherent in the academic system and how these can affect the co-authorship of research products. First, the purpose with doing research is presented. Next, three models of the research process are reviewed, describing their differences and similarities. Then, linguistic analysis is applied on a set of terms in guidelines for co-authorship described in some different universities in Sweden. The results present a model for a research project in offensive cyberspace operations and based on the output of the linguistic analysis, the model is used to quantify and describe what a substantial contribution is in three scenarios that merits co-authorship.