Co-authorship just because a Professor provides me the employment?

Question

I am a postdoc at a European University. However, I am planning to quit my postdoc in a month or so since the research environment and the city life is not to me liking.

Also, I work with a Professor who is very polite, but also very busy with meetings. My salary comes from the project he administers, so he is the boss of the organization and the project.

For the past four months I have been working on a problem day and night including weekends as I found the problem very interesting and challenging. The theoretical part of the work is complete. It is a "complete" solution. He had NO contribution at all in this. Not even a single email exchange. He is too busy with meetings all the time. He is in the department twice a week for two to three hours at a time. I am also managing his master student as he has no time.

He is definitely polite and nice though, but I have not received any input from him other than giving me printed research papers. But he always asked me to give him the PDFs of lengthy derivations which I did. But I am dealing with analytical/numerical Navier-Stokes equation and its variations, so you can imagine how much terse that is. He has the entire theory now with him from my work. He may have been a good researcher in the past but no contribution to this work. And he had no proper publication in the work that I am doing so I am not sure how much he can contribute in writing the paper.

Now remains the numerical part which I believe I can do in next 2/3 weeks. And I have the ability to write the paper by myself when I have the numerical solution.

I talked to him and asked if I can work for him based in another city. He said if it is a week visit, that is fine, but not otherwise. He said it clearly that "I will not pay you to work somewhere else."

I still have a cordial relationship with him. No worries on that part. So, I am going to leave the place and the position in a month or two for sure.

So, he gains co-authorship just because he has the authority to provide employment? What should I do? Please help. I could have continued to live in the city though it was little boring for me, provided I was able to get inputs from my collaborator, or if he had given me necessary freedom to collaborate with other researchers, which he hasn't.

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Update 10th June, I have resigned now. This problem has evolved into a new stage. Please post your replies there:

Gifting co-authorship if the topic of research was suggested by my boss?

and

Acknowledgment of funding and adding an affiliation in exchange of permission to use experimental data?

Answer 1

This is a form of gift authorship. The worst form, if he imposes it on you. I know some people would think otherwise, but my last supervisor, who was a big name in his field never signed papers he had no contribution on. And this was despite of the fact that he was the big grant writer and winner of the group.

It's hard to tell what to do. In my case, I used to simply do what I was told by the boss. Only I never had such dilemmas. But, I had a few friends who were in the same situation as you. When they refused co-authorship, their supervisors got angry. I work with one of these supervisors at this time. The guy went around and told everyone my friend "stole" his idea. Nevermind that dude had no ideas to begin with. The other guy, wrote a negative recommendation letter for my other friend who lost a very tempting postdoc offer over it.

My recommendation is to stall until you leave the group. Until then you fix all the details you need to fix for the paper and find out if your boss plans to contribute anything else to it. If it wasn't his idea and had so little involvement in it, once you are gone, you can publish without permission. As a courtesy, you can tell your superviser, after you're gone, that you are thinking of including him in the paper if he has time to make a contribution you think would be useful and within his capabilities. If not, include him in your Acknowledgements section.

Edit: backup your correspondence with him (emails). You may need them if he's the kind of guy who gets upset and writes your editor that you "stole" ideas from him. Hopefully, it won't be the case.

Answer 2

Different people would approach this differently. Given that you like to avoid conflict, why not give him authorship, finish your notice period, and leave on a happy note?

I don't think it would hurt you very much to add an author, especially your host. Rather, you are creating a collaboration that may be useful some day.

What you are suggesting, i.e. writing the paper with dual affiliation would actually be a little dishonest, because the work is all done at the first institute. This business of sharing your password and returning salary sounds rather unnecessary, and pardon me, slightly immature. I understand that you consider it the scrupluous thing to do, but let me assure you, it will leave a bitter taste with the institute and/or the host.

As I understand you are leaving because the city doesn't suit you, not because the institute is not supportive. No point burning bridges then, isn't it?

Answer 3

I find adding a contributions paragraph (or making the acknowledgements paragraph "Acknowlegements & Contributions") to papers and posters very helpful. I think they also have merit for the reader, providing a better idea whos specialization is what (particularly for highly interdisciplinary papers).

Some medical journals require it, and so far, I've neither met nor heard of a revision calling to cut that paragraph out. Even if that would happen, it means that the editor and reviewers have read it - which provides an outside control instance against gift authorship.

• In case we're really talking gift authorship, I think that even of those who'd accept a gift authorship without any second thought if it just involves entering their name on the front page, the vast majority would not type out outright lies about their contribution.

• I also assume that potential co-authors do know the rules for authorship, and hesitate to type out ridiculous non-contributions (provided instrumentation) that rather should be acknowledged. However, if that happens, I'd think you may just leave it as it is. Editor and reviewers will see it. They know the power difference between PhD students, postdocs, and professors very well, they'll draw the correctand conclusion. I trust they will also take appropriate action, as the reputation of the journal is directly implied.

• They do take action: I've made the experience of being upgraded to co-first-authorship by decision of the editor based on our contributions section.

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If your European University happens to be in Germany, the DFG rules for authorship are quite clear and avalable in German and English.

Part of the strategy for quality assurance for scienctific research is that there are ombudspersons for scientific questions.

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The question whether or not your professor is entitled for co-authorship IMHO cannot be decided from what you told us so far: while you did not describe any sufficient scientific contribution from their side, but it is still possible that there is sufficent contribution which you do not yet realize.

Please do not get upset, but we're all stranger to both you and your professor. We just know that:

• There are black sheep who take or even demand gift authorship.

• But we also know that there are students who do not recognize proper scientific contributions by their supervisors.

  • Typical candidates for such unrecognized contributions are: questions and possibly short (but to the point) conversations after seminar presentations, over a coffee. A suggested experiment or solution strategy on the hallway. Note: the length of a sentence is not a good indicator of the amount of thought or intellect someone put in to arrive at that sentence.

  • he does not contribute anything at all, other than placing research papers on my desk. And I never read those papers, never found them related to what I have been doing.

    How can you know that they do not contain relevant ideas if you do not read them!?
    How do you know he never thinks about the pdfs he asked for? Or never thinks about the topic even without your pdfs?
    (Authorship needs scientific contribution plus writing contribution - IMHO at the moment you cannot know that there aren't (going to be) any)

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Here are some borderline cases to ponder:

• suppose you have an ideal supervisor S and two students or postdocs: ideal researcher I and not-so-good researcher N. S closely follows their work. As S is a good supervisor, they work with least possible disturbance by S. Also, as a good teacher, any guidance is done in a way that the researcher in question is lead to discover the error/solution/correction themselves. S critically weighs all arguments brought by the researchers and pinpoints any weak points. Turns out, N needed some guidance to arrive at their paper, whereas I did not. I basically answered all questions before they were asked.
  Questions: So S clearly has contributed scientifically to the N paper. Is his contribution to I's paper less, solely because I is a better researcher than N? In other words, S doing the same except expressing a few questions to N which he doesn't express to I, does their contribution depend on the contribution of N vs. I? If so, could (or mabe even should) S ask some questions to I (that are OTOH neither necessary nor OTOH dumb), and thus gain a scientific contribution also to I's paper?

• Assume a supervisor S thinks over a problem long and intensive enough to arrive at an idea how to tackle/solve it. E.g. sufficiently to decide that a solution can be managed by researcher R within a reasonable time frame. If S then hands over the task and explains the proposed solution strategy to R who in turn solves the problem, they clearly have a scientific contribution.
  Questions: if the S hands over the problem, but for the sake of the improved learning possibilites for R does not (initially - though it is at hand should R not find their way) outline the solution strategy, does S lose their contribution?
  Once R knows the task, they avoid any discourse with S, in order to make sure they'll get a single-author paper (i.e. avoid S's co-authorship). Is this a valid strategy for R?

Please note:
Wheras I maintain (until you convince me of the opposite) that what I called scientific contribution, are scientific contributions, I consider it a different question whether they are sufficiently large to warrant co-authorship on their own (assuming everyone contributes to the writing, which is also necessary), and one where the answer is very much field dependent.
Personally, if I were a supervisor in the described cases, I'd prefer acknowledgement - but then you cannot count me as I'm not entirely in academia anymore and thus do not have the full publication pressure.

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"Could you please clarify if you are expecting a co-authorship even though I have done all the theory and the numerical part, and so I am confident I can write the paper by myself"? he will certainly say, YES. what next?

• I'd consider this rather unnecessarily confrontational - particularly as you say you'd like to avoid conflict.
• A more neutral alternative would be to tell him you're ready to start writing the paper and whether he wants to become co-author.

• If he then says yes, it is time to tie down who is going to contribute what to the paper.

• (BTW, This idea is largely not my own: I heard of a similar strategy from an acquaintance, where the student basically said they'd like to have professor as co-author on the paper, and what scientific contribution professor suggests to make)