My girlfriend is doing a PhD in a subfield of biology. She’s just phoned me up in tears as her supervisor has apparently “stolen” her work. Whilst browsing a journal website, she’s come across one of her supervisor’s papers and read it. Whole sections of the paper are based on data that my girlfriend has collected over the last two years towards her PhD thesis, yet she is not listed as an author on the paper. However, she is listed in an acknowledgment in a footnote, but only partially: sections of work based on data from my girlfriend’s lab work is unattributed, giving the impression that her supervisor carried this work out.
Understandably, she is upset, as she now thinks this work is unpublishable as it’s already appeared in print. Further, she’s adamant that she didn’t know her supervisor was writing this paper.
Though we’ve known that her supervisor is a bad supervisor (my GF is not allowed to go to international conferences but her supervisor does with posters made by my GF with her data on; her supervisor takes on undergraduate students and then expects my GF to stop work on her thesis and do work with them, etc. etc.), I think this crosses the line into academic plagiarism. Is this normal? Is this plagiarism?
I have heard of cases where the guy who runs the lab gets his name on all the papers but I believe the other people are listed as authors too. The head guy gets his name on a paper even if he had zero to do with the research.
In my experience in 35 years in academia, that is not normal. If this was data that was original work as part of her thesis research by your girlfriend, and was not paid work as a lab technician, that would be a gross violation of ethics. Even incorporating data by a technician, without informing them of the publication, would be unusual; many supervisors would include anyone who contributed to the research as a co-author.
I would go immediately to the head of the department or other responsible authority to complain, of course with any necessary documentation of the background in hand. And if at all possible, find another supervisor as soon as she can.
First, I don’t have any direct experience with this issue. The Ph.D. supervisors I all delt with may have been assholes, but I don’t think any of them would have or were doing this.
Second this is going to be a big can of worms that she is going to open. There isn’t going to be anything pleasant about it.
She is a grad student and a scientist, not a baby or undergrad that could easily be trampled on like this. She needs to bring this to her mentor’s attention that she needs to have proper attribution for her (it isn’t HIS) work. THis could be hard for her, so in place of that, I would recommend she go to another trusted and respectable faculty member or department chair and ask advice. I wouldn’t get the dean or administration involved at this point, unless the the advice from these other faculty suggest it.
Sadly, she will probably have to change groups because she can’t trust her mentor, and he will probably be totally pissed at her and make her remaining years there hard.
This can of worms might taint her respect in the field and make her less desirable for employment depending on how big this gets (I hope it wouldn’t get that big).
Or, she can just not say anything, get finished with her work against these adversities and quietly get her degree and move on.
Me? I think I’d at least go to a senior trusted faculty member or dept chair.
on edit
Damn: Wife distracted me…Let me be the SECOND to say this
Typically, the researcher who runs the lab or project gets their name on the paper as the last author, not the sole or even first author. (In fact, because of this being the last author has a certain degree of prestige when there are a large number of authors.) This is reasonable, since they often had the original idea for the research, and obtained the grant and provided the facilities that made the research possible, so it’s fair that they be included. This is pretty standard practice; I’ve had my name included on any number of papers in this way on projects where I was the official principal investigator (grant holder), even though the research was done by others (who ended up being first authors). However, in such cases I’ve provided advice during the research or helped write or revise the paper.
The order does sometimes depend on field. I saw a survey awhile back (no link, sorry) about the methods people used, and the one you say was first IIRC.
If the OP’s GF had simply felt that she was not given the right name in order, as if the advisor made it look like they did all the work and she was just helping, then she might have a gripe. Here, it sounds like she was completely unethically shafted. I would think about changing labs; it’s a shame that she had to learn this a few years in.
Yes, I have heard that this is usually the case in the biomedical sciences, but I think the conventions actually vary quite a lot from one scientific field, or even sub-field, to another. In some fields the head of the lab will get his or her name first, whether or not he made any direct contribution to the research. In others, the head honcho might not expect to be automatically listed at all. It is all a matter of informal (though sometimes quite rigidly enforced) custom.
With regard to the OP, I suspect it is really quite normal for a supervisor to present or publish material based on the actual research of one of their students, but what seems abnormal and unconscionable is that he did not give her any of the credit. Putting his name alongside hers, or even before hers, is probably normal and not necessarily unfair. If he suggested the research and/or did most of the work of actually writing the paper, explaining the significance of the results and relating it to other work in the field, that is by no means a trivial contribution, and may well be something that a Ph.D. student is not yet competent to do properly. However, not to have credited her at all is clearly wrong.
ETA: OK, looking again, it appears she was give some credit, but probably not nearly enough.
Whether or not it’s “unpublishable” is far from definite. The same data can be used as the basis for any number of papers if it is analyzed in a different way, or used to answer a different question. The most important consideration for a Ph.D. is that it consist of original research. If your girlfriend can demonstrate that she collected the data herself, then it should be usable for her Ph.D., even if the data itself or analyses based on it have already been published.
Given the importance of having an established track record in publishing research when looking for a job, many graduate students publish part of their research before they submit their theses. In fact, these days it is fairly standard for a thesis to consist of a series of linked papers designed for publication, some of which may have been submitted or even published.
The problem here is the data has been published without full credit. Unless your girlfriend can establish that she actually collected the data, there might be problems establishing that it was her original research, and thus not usable for the thesis.
Asshole as he appears to be, surely her supervisor would not attempt to deny her her her PhD. on the basis that he stole her data. That would be bad for him in at least two respects. First, it would expose him to a near certainty of his plagiarism being exposed (after all, he must know that even if she blows off the plagiarism, or had never discovered it in the first place, she is hardly going to take the denial of her doctorate on such a basis lying down). Secondly, it looks bad for him to have his grad students fail, and good to produce as many as possible from his lab.
My guess is that it has not yet crossed his mind that he has done anything unethical. (Which, unfortunately, will make the whole situation all the harder to handle.)
The supervisor is a woman. My GF has been e-mailing other members of the lab (postdocs and other RAs) asking if this is normal. Those she’s heard back from have said it isn’t normal, but not surprising with this supervisor.
The supervisor’s PhD student prior to my GF switched supervisor midway through, and for whatever reason, she became a pariah, nobody talking to her. The research group she’s in sounds dysfunctional. My GF has already e-mailed her supervisor asking for a meeting.
It’s what triggered my dropping out of a PhD; there were many other things wrong with that department. It does happen, but it is not normal in the sense of acceptable behavior.
While I didn’t see that trying to fight above the board would have done any good, I did pretty much destroy the career of the specific advisor who stole my research: he didn’t have tenure yet and by asking other professors to mediate in the issue, I raised a very big red flag. The Department Director who didn’t know his ass from his face and who had flunked every single student who wasn’t in his group while giving As to “his” students; the depressed Graduate Director; the sexism (seriously, giving ratings of zero to a female professorial candidate “for wearing a pantsuit”, the horror!); the… I couldn’t do much against that. Oh, and there had been another PhD student in my group who had left in circumstances similar to mine, only officially in his case it was “to move to the Uni his gf was in”; once Pandora’s box got opened, it didn’t take long to verify that our advisor had stolen from him too.
I work in the sciences and this is NOT normal. I’ve heard of tenured professors have lost their jobs doing this. This is a big no-no. If I were in her shoes, I’d *immediately *inform the ** Department Chair ** as well as inform the editor of the journal which the article was published. Maybe her graduate commitee as well. If there are whole sections of the paper have been plagiarized from her paper that should be easy to prove by showing the published paper and her own paper side-by-side.
So providing money and the lab and a bit of advice is enough to get your name as an author?
I’ve done actual work for a paper that was published and never got credit as an author. I suppose it’s related to the fact that I don’t have the right set of letters after my name.
What the OP described is at best a total asshole move and at worst a nasty example of plagiarism. I agree with the others who say that your girlfriend should at the very least try to seek some advice from a trusted faculty member, and seriously consider switching labs as soon as possible.
Ideally it’s not just “a bit of advice”. A good* adviser will regularly meet with their advisees to discuss and advise in all sorts of ways. The adviser should guide the project, help make sense of baffling results, troubleshoot failed experiments, help write and edit papers, among many other things.
Grant writing in itself is practically a full time job – some bigger labs even hire someone just to write grants!
So I think it’s entirely reasonable for a PI to get their name at the end of the author list. That’s the norm in my field, with the lead grad student/postdoc getting first author and any number of other contributors getting their name somewhere in the middle.
As the OP describes the situation, I think that his girlfriend should most definitely get her name in the author list, along with anybody that produced publishable data. Acknowledgments are for the guy who lent a piece of equipment, or gave some spare bit of reagent, or provided small but useful amounts of advice.
*of course many (if not most!) faculty members don’t make very good advisers. And different grad students need different sorts of advice – one might appreciate discussions and check-ins from their adviser, while another would view that same adviser as micromanaging too much.
Wouldn’t call it plagiarism myself - it’s a dispute about proper credit of authorship in the first instance. Your GF and her boss both have ownership of the data, and it’s been published with your GF receiving just an acknowledgement. As described, it sounds very unfair, but I must say I’ve seen plenty of cases (and mediated a couple) where PhD students were outraged over not being named authors, and it was entirely fair in the context of the work. It is impossible for anyone to really call this one one way or the other without reading the paper and knowing who did what.
General advice, though, to you GF to make full representation to the School is absolutely correct - if she feels she’s not been given due recognition she needs to say so - to her supervisor and to a third party - most likely her second supervisor, depending on the University’s system. Sounds like she’s started that so I hope it goes well.
The main thing that sounds improper from the OP is the lack of communication. The disputes I am familiar with are along the lines of ‘You’re getting an acknowledgement on this paper’‘You’re kidding, I did loads of work’ ’ Not really son, all the heavy lifting was done by X and it’s their paper’ Then take it from there. For your GF to stumble on her data in print, by surprise just from reading the literature, sounds really strange and does point to serious supervision issues.
Yeah and did the advisor not think that the GF would find the paper? I check up on mine every now and then, try to get a copy of everything in pdf, and he’s not an asshole so I don’t even have to worry about this I don’t think. It might be feigned or real ignorance on the advisor’s part.
I’m not in Academia or Science, but this is not at all uncommon in pretty much any field.
I was a Computer Programmer for 17 years. At several companies I was assigned to assist a Project Manager who then asked me to do certain tasks for him. Then immediately passed them off as his own work, thoroughly denying that I had done anything at all in regards to the work that was done. In some cases they got internal rewards for the work done, and when I raised questions about it, higher ups just shrugged and said it was my word against his and they didn’t want to hear any more about it.
About five years ago, I discovered that an acquaintence of mine had passed off an essay of mine as his own and had it published on the website of another acquaintence, one who absolutely did not like me at all. I discovered it only after the first guy had died and I was following up on some things related to him. In the end, the person took it down rather than properly credit it to me.
On one of my other jobs, a co-worker would blatantly steal ideas and suggestions from people around him and then immediately run to management and pass them off as his own. In one case, I discovered that a supervisor had left extremely sensitive information on a computer accessed by everyone. I carefully hid the information and was preparing to call the person and inform him when this same asshole immediately called up the supervisor right in front of me and claimed that HE had discovered this information and put it aside for the guy. When I started to ask what the fuck he was doing while he was telling the supervisor this, he immediately turned and walked away to continue the conversation away from me. Needless to say I never again trusted this person with any suggestions, ideas or even information about things I had done on the job. The interesting part of this is that this person had been a manager in another organization and had been fired, then reduced to lower level positions; and never really did give us a straight answer as to why he was fired other than claiming that he was being scapegoated. I suspect it was more something related to his claiming credit for other people’s work and ideas, and he probably got stupid and tried to claim credit for his bosses ideas or something.
Right now I’m sitting next to another individual like this. He’s gone running off to other supervisors twice with my ideas, so I don’t tell him jack shit anymore.
The lab head also often has provided the basic idea for the research to be carried out. Since the research would never have been carried out except for their initiative, it’s fair that they receive credit.
Not necessarily. It really depends on exactly what kind of work was being done. A paid technician, who is simply carrying out the directions of a supervisor, will usually not receive authorship credit but may appear in the acknowledgements. Someone who is carrying out research largely under their own initiative, solving problems and determining exactly how the research is to be done (though they may be under the general supervision of someone else), will often get authorship credit unless their supervisor is a jerk. But really it’s a case by case basis.
On the first paper on which I received authorship credit, I was a field assistant to a graduate student working on his Ph.D. He probably did 95% of all the work for the paper, but I contributed some information that made it more significant and publishable. So he made me (and another field assistant) co-authors. He was under no obligation to do so, and I was grateful that he included me.
I should add that I don’t work in academia , I work in industry but the people here do publish a good amount because we do research for the government.
Also when I do work it’s not just under direction of someone else, I do programming and I solve problems and come up with new solutions on my own.
The PI of the lab is usually the cohesive person for all the research that comes out of that lab over decades of research. People doing a paper survey on a research area will look up a PIs research to find all his or her work, not track down each individual first author over the years. In fact, for many biology PhD students, the work they do as a grad student is unrelated to the work they eventually direct in their own lab.
Most biology PIs (which is my area of expertise) have day to day interactions with the grad students and post-docs in their lab, helping to oversee and direct research. We had weekly lab meetings where everyone presented their current data for the PI (and others) to comment on and advise. They also do the majority writing of grants and direct the overall specific aims of a grant- leading the way for the work that is to be done. Ethically, researchers who contribute to a paper, regardless of degree, should be recognized as is appropriate. I was a first author (which was the prestige placement) as a second year grad student and buried in the middle as a senior post-doc based on the work I contributed.
To answer the OP- if it is true that it was her work, then the PI is acting unethically and unusually. Though it does happen. I had a whole line of research stolen by a collaborating PI from a offhand comment over the phone. It sucks.