Timeline for When should a PhD student be removed as first author?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 28, 2023 at 23:34 | vote | accept | mrp | ||
| Oct 29, 2022 at 20:48 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | @AnonymousPhysicist Yes, authorship changes should be an agreement among authors. A third party may or may not be necessary to facilitate that agreement. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 18:36 | comment | added | Anonymous Physicist | @cag51 and Bryan Krause: The asker says their problem is caused by difficulty recruiting qualified PhD students. You have responded by insisting that the asker has not mentored correctly. I feel that is not an accurate, reasonable, or respectful response. Difficulty recruiting qualified PhD students is a real problem most academics who recruit PhD students face and it cannot always be solved by mentoring unqualified students. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 18:33 | comment | added | Anonymous Physicist | @BryanKrause What exactly is your answer to the question? "It may be necessary to involve a third party" Are you saying a student should only be removed as first author if they agree or if a third party agrees? | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 5:40 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | @mrp All those pressures and stakes are true for everyone in academia, not just you, and not everyone is answering those pressures by doing all the work themselves once students fail. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 4:24 | comment | added | mrp | @cag51 That is exactly what I do. But it is a high-stakes game, because sponsors expect results, and you can only afford to replace so many students. Even just a couple months is a lot of time for a three-year project. And I know from experience that entry-level tasks are an insufficient indicator of a student's potential for PhD level research. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 2:59 | comment | added | cag51♦ | @mrp: I don't mean to keep second-guessing your situation, but to make one last stab at it -- don't you have useful, funded work that is not "critical"? For example, a study that you'd like to do but don't have time, or maintenance on your codebase or hardware, or implementing a potentially-useful algorithm or something? This would let you justify funding them for a few weeks or months while they get their feet wet. And if there is critical work that absolutely has to get done and published, you probably want to avoid giving that to someone until you're sure they can handle it. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 2:45 | comment | added | mrp | @cag51 That is certainly the ideal. Unfortunately it is untenable where I am. The only way to fund students at my institution is with external funding. So, once you get funding, you are forced to recruit an untested student and put them right onto a funded project. Ideally, students should be recruited, put on a departmental RA or TA, test-driven for a year or two, and then put on a funded project. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 1:21 | comment | added | cag51♦ | @mrp: I guess what I meant is that I'm surprised you would start a "real" collaboration with an untested student. Because you're right, once you've assigned a project to a student, it's hard to take it back and publish it without them. So I would have expected that you would spend the first couple of months just having the student do odd jobs to learn skills and build trust with no paper in sight. And only after they hit a certain point, you can decide to trust them a real project idea. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:23 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | More broadly, I think your core problem has very little to do with the question you've asked here: you have bigger issues than figuring out what to do with authorship. If there aren't appropriate mentors for you at your institution, you may need to find mentorship elsewhere - your own past research advisors perhaps, other schools in your region, and your broader network. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:21 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | Ah, well at least some DOD/DOE projects I could see having more of a delivery timetable than typical academic work from what I know of them. Specific deliverable dates for NSF sounds odd, though? That said, it's very much on you as a manager to manage throughout the project's lifetime, not only at the 11th hour. Break a project up into specific deliverables. Be prepared to manage down to the week. Have regular meetings on progress and blockers. You shouldn't be waiting until the 11th hour for a student to come through, you should be holding their hand through the whole process. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:17 | comment | added | mrp | @BryanKrause No, all federal. DOD, DOE, NSF. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:16 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | @mrp Are these industry sponsors? | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:14 | comment | added | mrp | @BryanKrause yep, there is definitely a lot of frustration :-) One aspect of the problem that I did not talk about is time frame. Often, there may be progress, it is just not fast enough for me or my sponsors. So when it's the 11th hour and the paper needs to be submitted, and the student still has not come through, I have no choice but to do it myself. (I'm one of only about 3 active researchers in my department and the most active by far. My chair and the other senior faculty could not care less about research.) | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:07 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | I should add that it's perfectly normal to be struggling with mentorship of graduate students; you've likely had no training in doing so. Learning doesn't stop when you become a professor. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:06 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | @mrp I sense you are a bit frustrated with how things are going in your lab with your students, so it may be that your post and comments here are reflective more of that frustration than reality. But, if your comments do reflect reality, it sounds like you're giving students 2 years to figure stuff out on their own and then judging them incapable when they aren't fully formed researchers after that. Does everyone in your department have these issues? Have you asked your chair or other senior people in the department for help? | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 23:00 | comment | added | mrp | @cag51 Generally this happens at the point when a student transitions from taking classes to not taking classes. I give a lot more leeway when they are juggling research and coursework. It is only when they begin focusing on research full time (and the learning curve work) that their capacity becomes apparent. It's not a matter of freedom - it's the reality that comes from having to recruit and support students from year 1 of grad school. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 22:50 | comment | added | cag51♦ | +1. Indeed, the strangest part to me is the statement that: after I year, I realize they've been goofing off the whole time and haven't actually done any work! Giving this much freedom to a novice researcher at a "low-ranked R2" seems very strange. | |
| Oct 28, 2022 at 22:42 | history | answered | Bryan Krause♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |