I’m giving a presentation at a conference. Three of the slides in my presentation were put together by a previous employee (Bob) who did the statistical analysis on part of the data. I’m trying to decide if I should include him as a co-author. Is it a level-of-effort thing, or just anybody that contributed in any way?
Myself and another ex-employee spent months of our time collecting samples, analyzing the data and writing reports. Bob spent an afternoon on the statistics of one part of it. He did the stats on it because it is beyond my level of stats knowledge.
Is there an etiquette book for this sort of thing?
Putting “Statistical analysis by Bob Doolittle” at the bottom of each of those slides would be courteous and (IMHO) appropriate. No other credit should be needed if he did not contribute to the presentation overall.
That would be one way to do it. You could also have an acknowledgements slide at the end where you give him credit for the analysis.
I don’t know what the rules for co-authorship on a presentation are. If it were a publication in a journal, it might be appropriate to include him as a co-author.
Are you presenting at this conference as an individual scholar, or as a representative of your employer? To me that distinction makes a difference. Typically any work you do (including former employees) becomes work product of the company. When I have done presentations at conferences, it has always been as a rep of our company. I would be listed as the presenter from XYZ Company, but there would be no listing of the individuals that contributed to the presentation, as it all belongs to the company.
I think it’s a little more complicated than contributors vs. company ownership. It depends on the level of the conference and the intent of the presentation. If it’s basically a sales pitch, no matter how disguised as a “white paper,” then company credit is probably adequate. If it’s a more generally informational presentation, while the sponsoring company might own it, it’s still appropriate and courteous to credit those who contributed to it. If Bob’s contribution was three charts of analysis, Bob should be credited for precisely that. IMVHO, he doesn’t qualify for co-author here any more than a photographer with three images in a book would.
Colibri’s suggestion is the way I’ve usually seen it done. As the final slide have a list of names of all of the people who contributed to the effort and include his name. I think singling out individual slides sounds messy.
It’s not a sales pitch. It’s more of a “Here’s an identified environmental problem and here are the results of figuring out the causes.” We typically get authorship on our work products, not just the organization.
Colibri’s method would probably work best. I’m already giving acknowledgement to the funding agency. I can certainly put in a “Thanks to Jane for wrecking the truck, and Bob for statistical analysis”.
All presentation I’ve ever seen from industry (and I’ve seen a lot) list presenters names and affiliations. The company always has to approve anything that goes out with their name on it, but only the most blatant of sales pitches would have only the company name.
While the presentation itself is not copyrighted explicitly in the conference I’m involved with, the paper is, and is signed over to IEEE by the company.
The funding agency usually goes on the title slide, and as a footnote in the first page of the paper.
I know of no hard and fast rules. It might depend on the field - in biology it seems that papers often have tens of authors, but in engineering five or six is the max. Usually a significant contribution to writing the paper or the work is used.
I wouldn’t credit Bob unless his statistics work is in some way innovative.
I had one presentation on a chip debug story where the final slide was acknowledgments, since in this case lots more people were involved than ever could be co-authors. But it is pretty rare.