The academic storybook is full of tales of advisers who mysteriously become first authors on their students' papers at the last minute and students who don't get credit where credit is due. Authorship and attribution are frequent topics of angst on the ScienceCareers forum, and stories like this one and this one are as common as tales of alligators in the sewers of New York City*.
As a grad student, I was lucky in that I never had issues with authorship. Sometimes I included people as co-authors because it seemed like good karma, and sometimes I just needed to do a little groveling. Whether it was out of appreciation or duty, one of my thesis papers ended up having five karma co-authors in total, though 100% of the writing and 100% of the data generation was mine. But I was first author, and I no one disputed that I should be. My adviser never insisted on being first author on my work, and never left me off of papers I'd contributed to.
My current boss, X, and I published two papers together while I was a student. I was first author on one, and second author on another. We collaborated well on those papers, and in each case the issue of first authorship was always clear cut. Because we never even had to discuss authorship before, I'm bewildered to find myself having authorship issues now, when the things I'm writing aren't entering the academic journal circuit.
A few weeks ago, X was asked to provide a report of our Initiative's recent activities to the dean and the president of the university. At this point, I'm more familiar with recent activities than X, so X asked me to write the report. But somehow, X was the one who sent it to Dean, who passed it along to President as X's work. Dean also sent the report to our U.S. Senator, who apparently is curious about what we're doing. So suddenly, I find myself in a position of having a senator (!) reading my work and thinking it's X's.
The senator's office was pleased with this report, and promptly asked Dean who asked X who asked me for a more detailed report. This one is much more work, and I'll be damned if my name isn't on it somewhere.
How should I deal with this? X isn't a power grubbing kind of person, but is clearly fine with attribution on the first report. Since we've dealt with attribution seamlessly in the past, I'd like to believe that this was just an oversight on X's part. But I don't want this to become a pattern, and I sense that it easily could.
I'm trying to figure out a way to bring this up casually, but clearly with X before we send of the latest report. Anyone out there have advice?
* Turns out that there actually was an alligator in the sewers of New York in 1935. If you've got Times Select, the article is worth a read.
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7 comments:
Is there a third party that you can talk to about this, who would be able to casually ask/point out that you weren't given credit for writing the first one?
Something along the lines of "I hear you've been keeping yourself very busy these days writing up reports on your Initiative. It's a good thing you just hired someone to help you with that sort stuff because with the interest the senator is showing, I bet you'll be even busier with more in depth reports for them. You should get Ivory Schmower involved next time."
and then hopefully that would be followed by "Oh, Ivory Schmower wrote the first report? I had no idea - I was told that you did."
and then hopefully X will realize that you've been (unintentionally) snubbed.
Of course, it would be nice to just talk to X yourself. But that takes more guts. But given that you have never had any bad authorship issues with X in the past, maybe X will be more embarassed about the oversight than you will be about talking to X about it.
Good luck!
Hmmm...interesting idea. There actually might be a good person for this job. It does take more guts to talk to X directly, but maybe doing so would set a good tone of directness while I'm still relatively new in my position.
Just to play devil's advocate, is it possible that X is not purposefully taking credit for your work? Seeing that this is not an academic publication, X might not be worried about who gets credit for writing and is more concerned with the Dean, Senator, etc seeing what a great program you have. I think it's definitely worth bringing up with X, maybe you could bring it up as a question about the new report? Something along the lines of trying to make the report more formal or polished and ask about including a title page or memo that would say somewhere 'prepared by Ivory Schmower'? Good luck!
Anonymous, I think you could be right, and I've wondered myself if X just didn't see this as a big deal. Raising my concerns as part of the preparation of the new report sounds like a good idea. Even something as subtle as a "For more information, contact Ivory Schmower" would work, and I think X would be amenable to that.
"For more information, contact Ivory Schmower"
That is very clever!
I'm confused, your current boss X was also your advisor in grad school??
No, X wasn't my adviser in grad school. X was at our current university while I was at another, but we worked together on two papers during that time. For the first of those papers, X served in an advisory role, and he was on my oral examination committee.
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