What category in my C.V. should I put papers where I've contributed but was not listed as an author, nor in acknowledgments?

Question

I performed a small set of experiments for a few published papers. The authors of these papers decided that my work was not significant enough to warrant my name on the papers. I am not mentioned in the acknowledgement section either, so my name isn't anywhere on the papers. (I left the group due to a lack of funding before they published the papers.)

I'm currently updating my CV and I'm wondering what category I should include these papers under. It should probably be separate from the "Publications" section where I am authors of those papers.

The field is in Biology and Biochemistry. Everything is done in the U.S., in a nationally-recognized lab.

Update: Thanks for all the answers and discussion. I am planning to just describe the experiments I did under "Work Experience" and add an author of the papers as a reference, in case there is a need for verification.

Answer 1

I don't think there's any good way to include these papers on your CV.

It's not conventional to list anyone else's papers on your CV, so by default everyone will assume you are one of the authors of each paper you list. If you aren't exceptionally clear, so clear that nobody could possibly misunderstand even if they are just skimming and not reading carefully, then you could easily upset people and give the impression that you are misleadingly inflating your publication record.

I think you could probably write it clearly enough (e.g., a section called "Papers in which I am acknowledged but not an author" or something equally explicit, in a substantially different location in the CV from your own papers). However, drawing too much attention to this unconventional choice would itself be a problem. You want the most attention-getting part of your CV to be your own accomplishments. If readers get distracted by something strange, then it will work against the primary purpose of the CV.

These papers would count for almost nothing on your CV anyway, so I see no purpose to including them. In fact, including something like this could look bad, by suggested a desperation to list as much as possible, regardless of how meaningful or important it was. The one case I can think of in which it might be a good idea is a student applying to grad school, with no publications yet but with acknowledgments in a paper or two. Then highlighting these contributions would at least be better than saying nothing. (But it's not worth it if you are an author on other papers.)

As I was finishing this answer, I noticed the comment that no mention is made of this contribution in the acknowledgments. In this case, the CV is absolutely the wrong place to deal with this issue, since it doesn't give an opportunity to clarify. Intentionally omitting someone who carried out experiments from the acknowledgments is unethical, and doing is accidentally is a serious oversight, but your CV is not a good place to accuse someone of poor ethics or sloppiness. (Without an explanation, nobody would have any idea what to make of this section of your CV.)

Answer 2

Crediting yourself for a published work for which your name appears nowhere creates a verifiability problem: how can the interested reader of your CV confirm that you did what you wrote you did? I also think that putting this work on your CV could create an awkward dissonance between your claim that the work that you did was significant and the lack of external acknowledgement of it.

I would suggest leaving this material off of your CV entirely -- except of course to mention the lab you worked in -- and then get a letter of recommendation from your lab supervisor. If this letter talks about your contributions to the lab, it will be much more convincing than if you mention it yourself. If you cannot persuade the appropriate party to acknowledge your work in a letter then you have a problem, for which the only easy solution is to drop the matter and not try to get "credit" in this way.

When you stop working on an academic project but still want to get credit for it, you should have a discussion there and then. For people who have continued to work on a project for months or years after you have dropped out of it, it is psychologically natural for them to regard you as "no longer interested". This does not mean that it is the right thing to do for them to forget about all your past contributions, but there is a risk of that happening unless you work to counteract it.

You should also understand it from their perspective: there is a world of difference between contributing something to a project and seeing a project through to its successful completion. To do a little bit of work on something, leave without showing any interest in the project's completion, and then insist on being credited with what you did no matter how much long, hard work the others have done in the meantime: that's not being a great team player. Even if you leave a lab and move away halfway across the world, it would be more professional to continue to signal interest in the successful completion of the project, including volunteering to contribute to routine writing and editing tasks. Doing this will probably result in much warmer endorsements from your former supervisors.

Answer 3

Another point of view: I'm a tripartite faculty and part of my duties involve consulting in statistics (I also do a small amount of chemistry research, but I'm primarily a statistician). I help with about 100 projects a year, sometimes as little as a half hour for help with a statistical analysis to very substantial work with researchers. In the latter case, I often get co-authorship, but not for the vast majority of these projects (I don't think I could ethically claim authorship when my contribution is relatively small). Where does this all go? Under consulting. It devolves from my research expertise and is part of my job. It would be silly to say that I can't put consulting on my CV because my contribution didn't rise to coauthorship.

How would it be verified? The same as any technical or consulting work... it they want, they can talk to the people I assisted, or else talk with the people who paid me.