Regaining first authorship on my research work
April 6, 2012 5:00 PM   Subscribe

Can I regain my lost rightful first authorship of a research paper?

Any advice would be helpful. I have completed a (bioscience) PhD. Unfortunately I started a different job before writing up and it took me 2½ years to write up fully.

I didn't submit my research papers immediately and my supervisor after waiting 2 years asked one of her postdocs to write up the work. I didn't object to this at the time, but she has put him down as first author (although most of the text, including all of the methods, results and figures, are straight from my PhD thesis). The postdoc himself took a further 2 years to write up the paper, so now 4 years down the line we are about to submit it. :-P

I feel very hard done by because this was a huge amount of work and consists of the entirety of 2 chapters of my PhD thesis, yet the post-doc's name is first on the paper (for merely summing up my work). We are both joint first authors but his name is first (ostensibly because it comes first alphabetically, although I know from prior experience that joint first authorship doesn't have to be alphabetical).

I have tried to appeal to my former supervisor that I should be first author as all the scientific content is mine and the post-doc second author but seem to have merely angered her by pointing out that I had done all the work (which reinforced to her the fact that I hadn't written it up) and she has simply rejected this. I want to try instead and appeal to be the first of the 2 joint first authors, but I strongly suspect that won't work either.

Am I being unreasonable (I feel guilty for not writing it up myself)? If I am not is there anything I can do about this?
posted by inbetweener to Science & Nature (24 answers total)
 
It's four-year-old work and you already have moved to another position? This can't be a particularly monumental publication, and it seems doubtful that it will have any impact on your career. Don't risk burning bridges over this.
posted by mr_roboto at 5:06 PM on April 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


You should go first to your co-authors, and discuss with them the order of attributions. Was there any thing about completing this task that really warrants the post-doc getting first authorship? Was the information from experiments ready to write up, or did it take substantial organization? Is your supervisor warranted in her irritation at you, that it has taken so long to get this paper to press?
You might also find out who in the university is in charge of overseeing research. Is there a dean of research or an ombudsperson? An outside perspective might help you find resolution.
posted by pickypicky at 5:09 PM on April 6, 2012


You might also find out who in the university is in charge of overseeing research. Is there a dean of research or an ombudsperson? An outside perspective might help you find resolution.

If you ever want a letter from your PhD advisor again, do not do this.
posted by mr_roboto at 5:10 PM on April 6, 2012 [4 favorites]


This doesn't sound right. If it was so little work, then why did it take you 2.5 years to do it?

I want to try instead and appeal to be the first of the 2 joint first authors, but I strongly suspect that won't work either.

You can ask, but there's probably a reason she put the order this way.
posted by grouse at 5:15 PM on April 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


We are both joint first authors but his name is first ... Am I being unreasonable

Yup.

You're already in this interaction with the postdoc and your supervisor, so shut up and be generous and gracious. If you're actually seething mad about it, keep shutting up about it and being generous and gracious, but maybe find reasons not to write with them again.

It sounds like you've already singed a bridge over which first author is more first. Do you want to burn it all the way down?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:16 PM on April 6, 2012


To me you are a little on the boundary of reasonable/unreasonable. It is reasonable to want first authorship given that it's your thesis, but it's also reasonable that the person who did the work to turn it into a paper should get credit, since without their efforts, there is no paper to argue over.

It's possible the postdoc feels mildly guilty or awkward about this and would agree to placing your name first, in which case you might as well ask him -- but its also possible that he pulled a substantial amount of work getting this thing done and has rightly earned it. It kind of depends on whether this was a cut and paste job the way you suggest, or whether there was a lot of effort in framing and piecing it together. I would guess at minimum it is more work than "merely summing up", because if it was that simple surely you could have done it, or he could have done it in less than two years, and naturally one cannot simply dump data and results into a document and call it a journal paper -- framing and context are critical, and difficult to get right.
posted by PercussivePaul at 5:17 PM on April 6, 2012


You have your PhD? Write it off as a learning experience. Next time if you want to be first first author then you can't wait 2+ years to put your paper together, and don't give someone else permission to write it (because then it's out of your hands).
posted by sbutler at 5:20 PM on April 6, 2012 [6 favorites]


Go to the website of the journal you are submitting this to and find their policy on authorship.

"...although most of the text, including all of the methods, results and figures, are straight from my PhD thesis"

If this is really the case, then the paper as it currently stands may be plagiarism in the most proper sense of the word. Misattribution of authorship is a BIG DEAL when stinks are raised. If you really want to make a stink then you can make very sure that this paper never gets published with someone else as first author anywhere ever. Since it sounds like your adviser has already written you off as a useful collaborator, this is really your only leverage. To be clear, YOUR ADVISER WILL NEVER TRUST YOU AGAIN, and will likely never have anything nice to say about you ever again.

Your ability to raise a stink is not really a very useful negotiating tool with your adviser since she knows it can never benefit you.

If this honestly is as bad as you say it is, that is according to the authorship policy of the journal and not your feelings of fairness, and you really are feeling these kinds of extreme nuclear options, talk to the post-doc. If it is as bad as you say it is, they will know it, and they will know how incredibly vulnerable they would be if the paper ever gets published without them having a written record of your consent.
posted by Blasdelb at 5:49 PM on April 6, 2012


You never wrote any research papers while you were a grad student? You're being unreasonable. You never finished the job. Why do you care now?
posted by J. Wilson at 6:04 PM on April 6, 2012


If this is really the case, then the paper as it currently stands may be plagiarism in the most proper sense of the word. Misattribution of authorship is a BIG DEAL when stinks are raised. If you really want to make a stink then you can make very sure that this paper never gets published with someone else as first author anywhere ever. Since it sounds like your adviser has already written you off as a useful collaborator, this is really your only leverage. To be clear, YOUR ADVISER WILL NEVER TRUST YOU AGAIN, and will likely never have anything nice to say about you ever again.

Do you mean that it is plagiarism of the thesis? Most journals do not consider a thesis "publication" for the sake of determining originality. And of course, inbetweener is going to be a first author of the paper, so inbetweener is not being plagiarized by the other authors.
posted by mr_roboto at 6:10 PM on April 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


mr-roboto, plagiarism includes wrongful attribution in addition to imitation.

Most journals that I've come across require that every single author be a part of both conceiving and planning the work that led to the report. If it is genuinely the case that the post-doc's only contribution to the report is writing it, then they likely don't qualify for authorship of any kind, much less first author. The most proper thing to do, with most journals, would then be to put the post-doc in the acknowledgements thanking them for assistance in preparing the manuscript. Adherence to these kinds guidelines is very rarely investigated, and so they are often routinely ignored by authors, but especially to do so in a fashion as dramatic as the OP describes should been seen by most as profoundly not ok.

Some journals also have requirements for first authorship that include anywhere from being involved in some of the data collection to being involved in the greatest portion of it, while some others simply require that all authors agree on the order of authorship, though many have no policy on order of authorship.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:48 PM on April 6, 2012


For the first author to have done none of the experiments is maybe a little unusual, but I've seen it happen in cases where the primary experimentalist abdicated their responsibility for writing the paper, submitting it, and taking it through peer-review. So I would say, a little weird, but not without precedent.

Anyway, if you cared this much about being first-first author, you should have been more involved in the writing and submission of this paper. My suspicion is that this particular ship sailed about two or three years ago.

Also, has the paper been submitted yet? If not, keep in mind that the new postdoc is likely to be saddled with doing the reviewer experiments for this manuscript, since almost nobody accepts a manuscript on the first pass these days. Taking responsibility for putting a paper through peer review can be a serious time commitment.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:22 PM on April 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


You already have first authorship. You should honestly be glad of that since you essentially did not write up the experiment and have left the lab.
posted by Lt. Bunny Wigglesworth at 7:38 PM on April 6, 2012


Let it go.

1) The PI has end say.

2) What journal was it in? Science? Nature? Otherwise, it's not a big deal. It would not have been published otherwise.

3) If you really cared, you'd have made the effort to get it to publishable level before/as-soon-after you left.

4) Did you have to do any further work to satisfy reviewers? Did the other first author?

Sorry, but there are bigger battles to fight.
posted by porpoise at 7:44 PM on April 6, 2012


Can I regain my lost rightful first authorship of a research paper?

Um, sorry for being daft, but you are still first author of this paper. You're just not listed first-first. Yes, after giving it away, and presumably not part of the write-up, it seems quite petty to put up a major fight about this. Seeing as how you are a first author here.

Look at it this way: if the other author hadn't written it up, you'd be a zero author! But you're not, you're a first author, congrats!

Say thank you to them all for finishing it. Send them a bottle of champagne upon the paper's acceptance.

It seems like you're transferring anxiety to this particular little situation for some other reason. Do you feel guilty for not writing it up? Are you attached to somehow not being finished with that project? Are you afraid of what will happen when you're finished? Something else? Give it some thought.
posted by barnone at 8:21 PM on April 6, 2012 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: Just to clarify - the introduction and discussion are reworded from the introduction and discussion from my thesis and all the analysis and interpretation is mine (reworded as the data is from two separate thesis chapters). The methods / results are cut and pasted and the figures have been made more attractive but the content is identical to those in my thesis. My supervisor gave the postdoc the responsibility for the paper before I had submitted my thesis, but now that he has access to my thesis he has been able to use that to create it. I did not try to claim back control at that stage as I was under the mistaken impression that I would remain first author. As to why I care, I suppose this is selfish, but I have to apply for a job in the next 6 months for which the lack of a first author paper would be a major drawback.

Thank you all for the responses here. I think they are fair and it is interesting and very useful to hear an external point of view. I will give it some more thought before deciding what to do but take the point that it appears the ship has sailed and the person who is to blame for this is, unfortunately, me.
posted by inbetweener at 12:25 AM on April 7, 2012


It's also worth noting that in the two areas of academia I have published in, the convention is that the person who actually wrote the paper for publication is the person who is first author. Therefore, my secondary supervisor for my masters is first author on the paper it became even though most of the wording is mine. A (senior and extremely helpful to me) colleague during my PhD is first author on most of the publications involving my research because she actually put the papers together, dealt with reviewers comments and so on.

Changing work from thesis to final paper is not trivial and usually involves a significant amount of work. The words may be mainly yours but bringing work from two different chapters will have involved a lot of rearranging and rewording and rewriting. That work is not insignificant, especially when it wasn't your work to start off with.

Two years is an awfully long time not to have started working on a paper and the authorship as it stands sounds fair (in the system I have experienced) to me.
posted by kadia_a at 1:33 AM on April 7, 2012


We are both joint first authors but his name is first (ostensibly because it comes first alphabetically, although I know from prior experience that joint first authorship doesn't have to be alphabetical).

I've known several people in your situation, left their PhD program without writing anything up, and you're getting way more than any of them. I know one guy that wasn't even listed as an author in the end because he was so unresponsive during the writing process, and being relegated to second is standard. This really is a common situation, right down to the details about getting a new job while you were writing, and the way your supervisor has acted is the standard way of dealing with it. I'm actually surprised that you haven't seen it yourself and that you don't seem to understand that this is the way it goes.

We were told right from the start that the person who writes the full draft is first author, and you didn't do that. Yes, you did the work and probably should be first but by not writing it yourself and also moving on to something else you gave that up (on a practical level at least). Joint first is a great compromise, and having the two in alphabetical order is also totally fine. You can put a note in your academic CV that you were joint first on that paper and you'll still get all the recognition required.

The only other option you have is to withhold permission for publication altogether since all decent journals these days need explicit permission from all authors for publication. It's clear that the work belongs to you enough that you must be an author and agree to it's publication. But that's going to be a very risky move career wise, it will pretty much make you poison as far as the old lab is concerned and for many new labs too (word always gets around). Take the publication, stop making a fuss, continue on with your new life.

And dude, publications are everything these days (even more than when I started my PhD five years ago). Don't let things slide like this again.
posted by shelleycat at 2:34 AM on April 7, 2012 [4 favorites]


My supervisor gave the postdoc the responsibility for the paper before I had submitted my thesis, but now that he has access to my thesis he has been able to use that to create it. I did not try to claim back control at that stage as I was under the mistaken impression that I would remain first author.

Attributions can often become complex and unfair - the reason a number of journals are moving towards making all authors specify exactly how they contributed to the paper. But if this post-doc was tasked with putting it together by the PI, and they did so successfully, then yes, I believe they deserve first-author status.

I recall a conversation I had with my supervisor soon after I started my PhD studies, where he explained the deal as far as he was concerned - it was my responsibility to write up my work and publish it. If I didn't, he would.

Perhaps the best you can hope for is making sure the paper closely references your thesis, and a clear statement that the work is based on your thesis in the acknowledgements.
posted by Jimbob at 2:57 AM on April 7, 2012


I think your supervisor's actions are appropriate, but he or she should have should have set expectations from the beginning. My dissertation advisor explicitly tells her students that if they don't write up their research within a year of graduation, she will write it up herself (or have someone else do it) and list herself (or whomever did the writeup) as first author and the former student as a junior author. Which strikes me as a totally reasonable policy.

It may seem like just "rewording", but the submission process is difficult, often involving substantial editing after review, and primary authorship is a fair tradeoff for shepherding the paper through that process. I'm sorry that you have regrets, that sucks.
posted by griseus at 6:51 AM on April 7, 2012


Also, has the paper been submitted yet? If not, keep in mind that the new postdoc is likely to be saddled with doing the reviewer experiments for this manuscript, since almost nobody accepts a manuscript on the first pass these days. Taking responsibility for putting a paper through peer review can be a serious time commitment.

This, more than any of the reasons stated, is why you should let it go. If the post-doc charged with writing the paper has truly done no experiments towards it (only the write-up), you do have a case for first-first authorship. But it is unreasonable to demand the place unless you're prepared to do all the experiments that follow. And there will be additional experiments, which you will not have the time nor inclination to perform. Be grateful that you have somebody taking up the mantle. I would happily give up first authorship if somebody completed the projects I left unfinished during my PhD!
posted by kisch mokusch at 7:08 AM on April 7, 2012


it appears the ship has sailed

I don't get what you think you have lost. You are joint first already. Probably no-one will ever care whether it's A, B, C et al, or A*, B*, C et al (*joint first), and certainly no-one will care about the non-existent distinction between A*, B*, C et al and B*, A*, C et al. These are the same thing, and you should not make any further fuss.
posted by roofus at 3:18 PM on April 7, 2012


Assuming that the benchwork, analysis, and the bulk of the writing is yours, then your name should absolutely go first. Whether you sat on the manuscript for 2 years or not, is not important. It's very common for results to sit around for months or years before being written up. It sounds like your prof pulled a bait and switch on you.

But you are in a difficult position because you (probably) can't afford to piss off your former PI. Here are a few options in order of escalating risk:

1. Assuming it was by email, go back and look at how your prof assigned responsibly for the paper to the post doc. If there is a written record, you have a stronger case to make.

2. If you have a faculty member you trust in your old department, you can contact them to solicit their advice. They may be able to broker something on your behalf. Or they may tell you to forget about it.

3. Withhold your consent for the paper or contact the university administration.

The attitude in this thread encapsulates much of what's wrong with academia: PIs telling students to "shut up and be generous" and students telling you to be happy for any crumbs you can get.
posted by euphorb at 4:14 PM on April 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


Most journals that I've come across require that every single author be a part of both conceiving and planning the work that led to the report. If it is genuinely the case that the post-doc's only contribution to the report is writing it, then they likely don't qualify for authorship of any kind, much less first author.

The widely-used International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Ethical Considerations in the Conduct and Reporting of Research: Authorship and Contributorship says this
Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
The work necessary in preparing an article for publication could definitely fit into analysis and interpretation. I have never seen a requirement that every author be involved in the conception and planning of the work, which seems rather far-fetched. By the way, this is what they say about order of authorship:
The corresponding author/guarantor should be prepared to explain the presence and order of these individuals. It is not the role of editors to make authorship/contributorship decisions or to arbitrate conflicts related to authorship.
A guide to handling authorship disputes published by the Committee on Publication Ethics says:
Order of authors: The ICMJE guidelines state that the order of authorship, should be ‘a joint decision of the coauthors. Authors should be prepared to explain the order in which authors are listed’. They rather unhelpfully do not give guidance about the order in which authors are listed. Wherever possible, make these decisions before starting to write up the project. Some groups list authors alphabetically, sometimes with a note to explain that all authors made equal contributions to the study and the publication. If you do so, make sure it is clear to the editor.
***

If you have never brought a paper to publication yourself, it seems quite likely that you are underestimating the work involved, and understating the necessary contribution of the postdoc in carrying out this work. If there were no substantial work involved, it would not have been necessary to involve the postdoc—either you or the principal investigator could have submitted the work themselves.
posted by grouse at 5:31 PM on April 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


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