I asked my wife, who is a biologist, about this. She said that in her department the rule was that if the paper could not be published without the contribution of a person, that person should get authorship credit - at some level. 90% of a paper is the data, so the person who does the experiments and collects the data definitely deserves more credit than an acknowledgment. If fact, she said this should be reported to the university ethics committee.
Some questions for the Captain. What is the position of the supervisor in the department? Does she have tenure? How much grant money and lab space does she control? Does she have regular meetings with her supervisor?
If I were her, I’d email the department chair and the other members of her committee her concerns - not an accusation, just concerns, and then mention the meeting. This will get her side of the story seen before the supervisor has a chance.
It is not plagiarism, by the way, since the writing is original with the supervisor. Is your GF’s name on the posters? It is not at all odd that she is not allowed to go to international conferences - this happens usually only if there is funding for it (my daughter got this) or you are a senior grad student near completion (which is how I went to one.) And supervising RAs is also pretty normal.
I have a suggestion as to what she could ask for - that a letter be sent to the journal requesting that a correction be published adding your GF’s name to the author list. This is good for a couple of reasons. First, it is not a big deal. Second, your GF will be able to put the paper on her c.v. Third, though the supervisor could give a mistake as the reason for the correction, no one makes mistakes on author lists in academia, so people will know the real reason.
Odd. Project managers are usually expected to manage, not do everything themselves.
Not communicating anything doesn’t work also, since a team does things better than a single person. In an old job, we had people write up their accomplishments for the year, and included this unedited list along with the evaluation of their manager. Our meetings were run by a second level manager, and discrepancies could be easily discovered. It often came out in favor of the employee.
Since you seem to have this problem a lot, might I suggest that if you have a great idea you broadcast it widely, either through an email or at a group meeting, or just door to door. That will improve collaboration and establish priority. But we already are way into IMO territory here.
She’s a Professor at a large UK university, and is well-known in her field. Not sure about funding, but I don’t think they’re hurting for neither lab space nor funding.
Well, the writing may be hers, but the data and analysis of that data isn’t. The reason my GF worked out what had happened was because she recognized her own graphs/charts and various other statistics.
Anyway, I’ll have to see what happens. As I said, she’s asked her supervisor about the paper.
Assuming that the data is even slightly important to the papers conclusion publishing it without notification would be really dodgy even if she had given your girlfriend a full author credit, without that it’s way over the line. Seconding Voyagers suggestion of contacting the department chair expressing concern and the idea of seeking correction to the author credits on the paper.
She does need to be very careful though. In my own experience the shocking thing about academia isn’t the crazy stuff that happens, it’s how often the people concerned get clean away with it.
She isn’t at Sheffield is she?, this sounds kinda like my old group :eek:
If this in the UK I would guess the funding is coming from the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council. BBSRC, like all the other Research Councils, have requirements about how organisations they fund deal with Scientific Malpractice (see here). The problem would be as to whether this is seen as “malpractice” by the supervisor’s bosses. The requirements for protecting those raising concerns are clear but how it works in practice is another matter.
I had alot of fun with this kind of stuff at a prior employer as well. Many of our processes were very primitive or being performed on pencil and paper. I was writing new production planning and inventory forecasting stuff in excel and access on a daily basis.
Part of why I left was because I was passed over for a promotion and when I asked what the other person was doing so much better than me they mentioned the beautiful production planning work she was doing for our warehouse. She had failed to mention that she was using an access database I wrote all she was doing was plugging in about 50 numbers off the delivery schedule and my software spit out the plan. It took 8-10 hours to do by hand what my program was doing in 15 min. Funny thing was I was well known for writing this kind stuff. I was marginally famous within the company and had a wall full of awards for improvements to inventory and production management. The funny thing was when I got a phone call asking to do some updates and modifications to my stuff a few months after I quit. I wrote up an estimate based on doing it as any other computer project was gonna take about 6 hours charging $49/hr
Never heard another word about it, which I found hilarious because even paying me $300 would save the company thousands of dollars a month in labor. I asked an old co-worker about it a few months later, apparently there had been a huge shitstorm and several people had been disciplined because they were all claiming that tools I wrote were their own but they could not modify them or add anything to them without destroying them. The reason why I never heard anything back was because of fears that I might try to enforce some kind of software licencing over the programs because I was no longer an employee.
This happened to my roommate in college, but he was working on a BA so he ignored it.
She should report it to someone for two reasons:
She should get credit for a publication. Some college will base her tenure or full professorship on the number of publications she has.
And even more important in my opinion. If she uses the data in her thesis, what’s to say they won’t accuse HER of plagerizing The PROFESSOR?! Her career would be over.
Jesus. I once got credited on a paper where my only contribution had been to do a cheesy graduate-school-class-assignment level calculation on the molecule in question – and the molecule itself had been suggested by the professor who later decided to write up a whole formal paper on it.
So no, not normal, at least not in my experience. If she’d been credited as co-author and acknowledged properly in the text it might be different, but she wasn’t.
Agreed on both counts. The number of publications is important not just for tenure, but any time she is evaluated in an academic context (job and grant applications, and even immigration if that’s a possibility). It’s bad enough that the advisor didn’t encourage her to publish the results herself. To use the data and not list her as co-author is completely unacceptable.
As one who runs a middling-large academic lab myself, its not normal.
I don’t even understand why a PI would do this. As the PI, I don’t need to steal my grad student’s or post-doc’s work. They get first authorship, I get last authorship. That’s how it works. I am evaluated on the number of senior (i.e. last) authored papers I publish. Once you are faculty, you don’t need first authorship.
The only time something like this came up in my lab is when I had to fire a post-doc, who then wouldn’t write up the data - I think he thought it would keep me from publishing it. I wrote it up, I was first author, and I put him on as last author as a courtesy (didn’t even have to do that, as we had to repeat everything he did anyway since his lab notebook was atrocious).
In my experience the chemistry world, folks tend to err on the side of including authors. I certainly have a publication where my contribution was minimal. However, some of the data tables would have needed to be shortened had I not contributed. I included a postdoc on one of my papers even after I ended up not putting anything he had done in the paper; I felt his intellectual contribution had been substantial and our PI agreed.
As for author ordering, chemists typically put the PI last, but this wasn’t always true and there are some holdouts (e.g. Scott Denmark and a few others.) The general feeling seems to be that you’re labeling yourself as a douche if you list yourself first when you didn’t do any of the research or even write the damn thing, but some folks have an inflated sense of their importance.
PS Might not be a bad idea to photocopy her lab notebooks that have the original data, since they’re evidence that she did the work.
I also am not in academia, but I can tell you theft is rampant. I used to be in H/R and have developed several programs for employee relations. Several times I have been asked to produce this on job interviews and I always found out that the H/R manager just stole it and used it without paying me for it. I had my own business and would market these programs on my own.
However you run into trouble since you if you list such services on a resume they are requested. If you say “Sorry I can’t show you anything but an outline as I’ve had theft of materials” what you’re doing is accusing the person of stealing or at least intent to steal.
In my case I removed it from my resume. It’s sad but theft of work is so common now it’s just a way of life.
Having previously worked in the pharmaceutical field, I can tell you that as a low level researcher, I heard several PhDs bitch about how the head of research got second authorship and in one case first authorship on their research publications which he would scarcely read, let alone be able to talk to the work being done. In all cases though, the person who did the actual work always got an author credit as your girlfriend should have received.
One exception might be if your girlfriend had simply supplied the data that was used in the paper based on experiments designed by the supervisor. After all, my name has never never appeared on a scientific paper, though I certainly carried out plenty of work as directed by a PhD. I was just a ‘lab monkey’ and perhaps your girlfriend was viewed the same way. As an undergraduate, I did some basic research in biology that provided the foundation for more detailed work done by a PhD that I was never credited for either. Perhaps that’s why I’m ultimately not in this field anymore… Still the pharmaceutical world treated me pretty well overall, so I can’t complain…
This is true, but would not be the case if the data were collected as part of her own thesis research. If it were for her own research, she would have had to have designed the experiments herself (perhaps with some advice from the advisor).
It might be possible for a grad student to be paid to run experiments that had nothing to do with her own thesis problem, but it would be extremely unusual. Most grad students are fully occupied doing their own research.
It doesn’t match my experience, also in a biology-related subject at a major UK university. I recently Googled my name and discovered that about 25 years ago my supervisor published two papers after I had left and put my name on them. One I didn’t recognize the subject matter at all, and he put his name first, my name second (and last). The second paper was closer to my PhD research and he put me first and himself second (and last).
No, she designed the experiments herself, and got a technique working that hadn’t previously worked.
Anyway, she e-mailed and met with her supervisor who basically said “oops” and gave a non-apology, promising to restart work on a paper with my GF which she mysteriously stopped working on a few months ago, using the same data.
The chances of this going any further are slim, because she has just over a year left, and has just had some other bad news, so work is a pretty low priority at the moment.
I recall a discussion with someone who worked at CERN and he laughed about the fact that withe the amount of effort required to get time to do an experiment on their big equipment, everyone had a hand in the experiment and the results; a paper might have a page of names just giving author credit to anyone peripherally involved.
If you recall the story of Banting and Best - most famous in Toronto, where they discovered how to isolate and use insulin to treat diabetes. Banting was just a graduate student, but he had an idea and the head of the lab, McLeod, grudgingly gave him a corner of the lab to experiment on dogs. Best was a lab tech partner with no significant degrees.
So when he saved millions of lives all over the world and made a huge change in medical progress, the Nobel Prize went to… Banting and the Lab Manager McLeod. (or was it McLeod and Banting?) Best was nowhere to be seen.