Is this normal or exploitative?

[NinetyFiver]

I'm a PhD student, also working as an hourly-paid research assistant on a project with a small team of senior academics (including my supervisor), and I'm wondering if I'm being exploited. As part of this role I was tasked with analysing some data and writing a detailed report on it. This took way longer than my allotted hours but I wanted to do a good job as I care about the work (it relates to supporting a vulnerable group of people). When I presented it to my colleagues they immediately started saying we should turn it into a paper for submission to a journal. I've now been told by my supervisor that one of the project team (a professor) has started working on doing this, and that I should wait and see what happens.

This prof has form for piggybacking on students' work and I'm worried he is going to claim the work as mostly his. Can anyone tell me what the acceptable protocol is for this sort of thing, ie. should I be named as lead author if the original work is mine, even if I'm only a student, or can he edit/rewrite it and put his own name first just because he's an established academic? And what is the best way to voice my concerns about this without making things difficult for myself? My relationship with my supervisor is OK but he is good friends with this prof, so I don't feel he would support me over him. I also currently live in a different country from my university so all our interaction is remote, therefore it is difficult to have an informal chat. Any advice gratefully received!

What do you mean by "analysing the data"? Who generated the data and designed the study?

@GCAcademic has articulated the key point. From what you have described, the lead author would typically be the person who designed and managed the study. You would be a coauthor.

Thanks for your replies - the overall study design was a team effort between 2-3 of the project team including this prof, but I generated the data.

I would agree with PP's that the lead author would usually be the person who lead the research and managed it, especially if this person is now leading on writing the article. Who was the PI on the project?

If you generated the data and analysed it, you'd have a pretty high spot on the author list. Have you seen the ICMJE guidelines on authorship?

I'd always advise having honest conversations about authorship early on in the writing process. Have these conversations by email so there's a record. I'd recommend setting your stall out now with the various people involved - that you're excited to see the work progress to an academic article and want to clarify your position (as second author?) on the author list given the work you've done.

In answer to your question, no, you haven't been exploited here.

Great reference from @KStockHERO

First authorship can be quite finely balanced in situations like this because you have two people with very significant but very different contributions to the work, and you have to pick one to be first. It can come down to things like how much of your analysis was creative or novel (as opposed to following the expected steps, however well executed) and who has the time to write it up for publication.

I think it can also be field dependent. My field is relatively quick to make a student first author, with the senior academic second (with the student doing the writing if at all possible). That works for us because it's the norm in the discipline and people understand what that likely represents in terms of contributions.

Thank you, this is very helpful- I hadn't seen those guidelines.

Thanks, it is useful to know it isn't always straightforward. I'm probably worrying over nothing, it's just this prof's tendency to add to his publications by tagging onto the work of others that's making me nervous! I will try and sound out my supervisor about it all, but beyond that it sounds like I'll have to wait and see what this colleague decides to do with the article. It's good to hear the convention in your field is to make a student first author if they've made a significant contribution - I feel strongly about senior academics on permanent contracts supporting students and precariously employed ECRs in this way, especially in today's climate.

this prof's tendency to add to his publications by tagging onto the work of others that's making me nervous
This isn't what the professor's doing - he's not 'tagging onto the work of others". He designed and lead the project and is now writing the article which entitles him to prominent authorship.

it sounds like I'll have to wait and see what this colleague decides to do with the article
What are you waiting to see - do you mean wait and see whether an article comes out at all? Or wait and see what the article will look like? If the article is happening (which your OP seems to suggest) then I'd get ahead of the authorship question now - set your stance and expectations out sooner rather than later. If the professor writing the article starts to sends drafts around, people will start commenting, adding, editing, and with that might come some jostling over authorship order. The risk here is that your claims get drowned out. If you set your stance out now and by email then you can either shape that conversation itself or you can have more legitimate claims in it later on.

What discipline are you, OP?

This isn't what the professor's doing - he's not 'tagging onto the work of others". He designed and lead the project and is now writing the article which entitles him to prominent authorship.

Perhaps I was unclear - I wasn't saying he was necessarily doing this to my work, but referring to his history of doing this to others (this seems quite well known in my dept as I've heard others joking about it), which is why I'm uneasy about it. You make a good point about raising the subject of authorship now, and in writing, so as painful and awkward as I find this sort of thing I will do this! I'm in social sciences (my own research is on policy in my current country of residence).

A few things to add

Take a look at this website on Credit which is an official way to recognize the different contributions that authors make to papers. It is used by many journals, at least in Life Sciences, so you can see how your contribution fits in
https://credit.niso.org/implementing-credit/

it seems from your posts that you have done the analysis and made plots. But did you actually do experiments to collect data? or is this a secondary data analysis? have you actually written the text of the paper?

if you want first authorship, you may need to make a major contribution to writing the text of the paper. that involves integrating your work into the existing literature and explaining it clearly, and it can be a substantial amount of work. Who is doing that work?

from what you've said, I don't see evidence that the professor is exploiting you.

It's good to hear the convention in your field is to make a student first author if they've made a significant contribution - I feel strongly about senior academics on permanent contracts supporting students and precariously employed ECRs in this way, especially in today's climate

big caveat in my field - the first author is the one who write the paper AND carries the paper to completion, not a mere token of appreciation or a "way to support" ECRs.

And i object quite strongly to the permanent minimisation of the work that senior colleagues have in designing and leading / managing projects - one of my junior colleague felt it was fine to take a grant i had written and invited them on and repackage it into a fellowship for themselves, not acknowledging my initial ideation or writing, "because fellowships are for sole ECR applicants".

Saying this, i see where you come from - i was also on a similar contract at the end of my phd, did some data collection and analysis (with some initiative on a new method development) and only realised years (10+) down the road that they had written the papet without me (i am not even acknowledged). So it makes sense to have an open conversation about potential authorship now - just in case.

The guidelines for Sociology are here: BSA Authorship guidelines

They say "Order of Authors

1. The person who has made the major contribution to the paper and / or taken the lead in writing is entitled to be the first author

2. Decisions about who should be an author, the order of authors and those included in the acknowledgements should usually be made by the first author in consultation with other authors.

3. Those who have made a major contribution to analysis or writing (i.e. more than commenting in detail on successive drafts) are entitled to follow the first author immediately; where there is a clear difference in the size of these contributions, this should be reflected in the order of these authors.

4. All others who fulfil the criteria for authorship should complete the list in alphabetical order of their surnames.

5. If all the authors feel that they have contributed equally to the paper, this can be indicated in a footnote."

@Marasme I agree with you.

PhDs/ECRs are very quick to draw quite rigid boundaries around work, claim it entirely as their own and then get pissed off when senior colleagues who did have a hand in designing/shaping/leading that work step in to claim credit/authorship. I think PhDs/ECRs have a sense that any academic input into projects/publications that are carried out by PhDs/ECRs fall under the umbrella of 'supervision' and, therefore, don't warrant authorship or credit. There's an unwillingness to acknowledge that little of the work would actually have even happened without that academic input. I think there's an insidious 'generational divided narrative that PhDs/ECRs have been fed (by UCU) which had fostered a sense that academics are screwing ECRs over which feeds into these kind of minimisations of academics' work, input and credit.

I'm not denying that some academics do try and muscle in on publications. But it's rarely a case of them stealing the work for themselves entirely.

I do think it's a system that often works well, but I will echo @Marasme – if the student is to be first author, they are generally the one to write up the paper (with support from supervisors) and lead the revisions, etc. As soon as they aren't in a position to do that, it starts getting difficult. They might still squeak into first author if their thesis was close-ish to publication standard, so the second author is more doing substantial editing rather than writing. It's still difficult conversation territory, though, and anything beyond that, and you're starting to look at senior academic first and student second author. Getting the material to publication standard and then through the publication process is a lot of work.

@KStockHERO - i totally agree, and see it impacting mostly women supervisors, who are doing the heavy lifting in raising supervision standard and research culture, whilst training and shaping research, yet get tarred with the same brush as the weirdos of the field.

the weirdoes keep being weird and exploitative, whilst the female supervisors lose faith in a system where they get screwed by both toxic colleagues and supervisees who follow these unfair narratives.

And i object quite strongly to the permanent minimisation of the work that senior colleagues have in designing and leading / managing projects - one of my junior colleague felt it was fine to take a grant i had written and invited them on and repackage it into a fellowship for themselves, not acknowledging my initial ideation or writing, "because fellowships are for sole ECR applicants".

Absolutely @Marasme !

I work in the humanities, where the issue of author order & co-authorship doesn't occur so much.

However, I have lost count of the times when a PhD student has taken on a range of suggestions I have offered them, and re-packaged as their ideas. Well, yes .... up to a point, Lord Copper. But in some cases I know that the student wouldn't have got there all by themselves.

And don't get me started on PhD & post-doc candidates, with whom I spend time to help them develop & hone their project applications (for studentships or stand alone fellowships) only for them to take the work to another institution. I am careful to caveat that if they want my time, they need to commit to my department; but recently, I had a post-doc do exactly that, after I had explicitly told them that to do so would be an act of professional rudeness (I think they were unethical as well).

There's a symbiosis in research collaborations, from PhD onwards, and sometimes it would behove PhD students & post-docs to recognise this. And PIs need to recognise this as well! But not all of us are the stereotypical predatory professor - I think this is a lazy stereotype and ignores the role that even a possibly predatory senior academic has in keeping junior staff in jobs. I wonder whether all the stuff we do to help PhD students "professionalise" means they forget that it is also necessary to recognise the labour which is currently above their pay grade. In my field, there's a certain level of entitlement combined with resentment of senior colleagues which does not bode well for my discipline. There's a big academic FB group with regular posts about refusing to do the "unpaid labour" of peer reviewing or organising conferences. So who's going to facilitate these aspects of other people's research careers, I always wonder.

As a PI, I sweat blood conceptualising my follow-my-nose research interests into collaborative projects so I can employ post-docs. I have kept several people in work so they can stay in academia. The projects may be team efforts, but it's my ideas and research track record which bring in the dosh. I really like collaborating, because my single-authored work is always better for collaboration with my colleagues. And their work is acknowledged in my footnotes and bibliography (I read their stuff), as well as the acknowledgements. But I think some ECRs need to recognise the work that goes into the projects which employ them. And the administrative work that PIs do - my current project needs at least a day a fortnight on administration of the research, rather than the research itself.

Rant over & back to the endless emails ...

There is a lot of exploitation of PhD candidates and post docs out there though, I think the OP is fair enough to ask for clarification! I definitely ended up feeling like a paper machine for someone else’s career early on, and very unsure about what was ok and what wasn’t (I now think quite a lot of it wasn’t). So now I’d be careful to always be very explicit about authorship expectations and what contributions mean. The reason UCU have been successful in stoking this resentment is because there are lots of cases where it’s true.

Just to throw in a different type of ball, I am doing a PhD but also do freelance commercial research. As an associate researcher, it would be entirely normal to be brought in to generate some data within an already-established research design and then write up that section without expecting attribution in the final report. Because that is what you are paid to do. Actually, no one gets attribution because it is just attributed to the organisation as a whole. I know it's a different world, but I just found your post a bit surprising.

If you wanted to write a paper, especially as first author, surely you would take the initiative and then take the lead on turning that piece of writing into a published paper?