How to find out whether my advisor expects to be author of a paper to which she did not contribute?
For almost every paper (and particularly if you are the sole author), it’s a good idea to have an “internal peer-review”, i.e., have a colleague who is not an author read the manuscript and give feedback before actually submitting it to a journal.
(The main reason for this is that it is much faster and interactive than peer review.)
Usually this internal review is done by other advisees of the professor, other professors within a collaborative project, or close colleagues.

Now, if you are authoring a paper on your own, your advisor is the most obvious choice to perform the initial peer review¹.
Moreover, in many cases you also have to report to your advisor about your research not due to authorship reasons, but due to her being your superior (in the employment sense), because the rules of your PhD programme say so, or similar.
This gives you enough reason to talk intensively about your work, without delving into the issue of authorship first.

Now, the details depend on how much you already communicated about this piece of work and how you generally communicate within your group, but here are a few suggestions:


Ask your supervisor to internally review your paper, but leave the author field blank. This may prompt your supervisor address the topic herself, telling you what she wants. There are some variations of this, which differ in risk and effectiveness, such as to giving her a paper which only lists you or both of you as the author or thanking her for constructive feedback in the acknowledgements.
If your target journal requires a list of explicit author contributions (“X and Y designed the experiments; Z held the Giraffe, …”), you may be able to elicit a response by having a title for this segment, but leaving a big and fat “TODO” below it.
If this did not yield any feedback, you can now bring up the issue of authorship mostly neutrally, saying something like:


  It seems that the paper is ready for submission now. Now, we only need to talk about authorship.

Maybe the internal review prompts creative contributions from your supervisor that would justify authorship and you avoid the dilemma altogether (but lose your sole authorship).


Be aware that if you really want to be the single author of this paper, giving the paper to your boss for review may be a slight risk, as it may give her a reason to think that she should be a co-author in the first place.

Finally, do not forget that authorship is not only about writing the paper. So, if your supervisor gave constructive input to your work, this may qualify her for authorship even though you did all the work and writing.




¹ unless this is a “hobby” paper in a completely different field