Advisor publishing students' work as sole author - ethics and motivation

Question

This is a question about my advisor (supervisor, professor) in a lab, where I am a graduate research assistant, and had done research together with a PhD student, as a part of his dissertation. The student happened to be one of my close friends. The professor wanted to write a journal paper based on the results of his dissertation with that candidate. This was kind of near the end of his PhD program (three weeks before final defense). At that time he said that he was already stressed out about defense and will write the paper after the event as it won't take him more than a week.

After he graduated, he had asked the professor about the journal paper but the professor kind of brushed it under the carpet saying he is looking for CFPs (call for papers) where they can write and never got back to him, despite his constant inquiries.

For his research on human-computer interaction, I had developed applications which formed the core of his project. So my advisor asked me if I was interested in writing the paper and she convinced me that since I developed the applications (that formed basis of the research) it was fair enough that I write it. But after a week, she ignored me and wrote the paper herself and submitted it to the journal.

I came to know last week that my advisor wrote the paper herself and got it published. This professor is an assistant professor trying to get tenure. I am trying to understand the motivation behind this behavior.

My questions:

1. The journal paper was published by my professor as sole author. Won't the paper count towards her tenure if she wrote it with a graduate student or will it count towards higher credit if she is the sole author?
2. Is it ethical to publish the paper based on my friend's dissertation? (I mean it is legal, because she will be referencing his PhD dissertation, but is it ethical or common in academia to sidestep the original author?)
3. Should I be listed as co-author for all papers coming out of this research because I developed the applications that formed basis for this research? I mean the concept for them was not mine, but I did program them.

Answer 1

Before anything else: Don't walk. Run.

There are almost certainly details of this story that you have omitted, or that you have unintentionally embellished, or that you are unaware of, and clarifying those details here would be inappropriate. What is clear is that your relationship with your advisor is completely broken. Get help, and get out.

Q1) Wont the paper count towards her tenure if she wrote it with a graduated student or will it count towards higher credit if she is the sole author?

All publications count toward tenure, whether solo, with colleagues, with current students, with former students, or with strangers from Zanzibar.

Q2) Is it ethical to publish the paper based on my friend's dissertation? (i mean it is legal, because she will be referencing his phd dissertation but is it ethical to sideshaft the original author)

There are a few different possibilities here:

1. Your advisor's submission does not report your friend's thesis work as her own, but rather builds on your friend's work in a novel direction. In this case, your advisor's submission is ethical, but perhaps a bit unfriendly. After all, the success of her students is a significant component of her upcoming tenure case.

2. The results in your friend's dissertation are the main topic of your advisor's submission, but your friend did not make a significant and novel contribution, and therefore does not deserve coauthorship. But in this case, your friend also does not deserve a PhD, and your advisor's signing his thesis was unethical. This possibility seems highly unlikely; passing a thesis defense generally requires the unanimous approval of the entire thesis committee.

3. Your friend made a significant and novel contribution, which is the main topic of your advisor's paper. In this case, your advisor is being grossly unethical. Fortunately, since your friend's dissertation is easily accessible online (Isn't it?), any competent referee or editor should quickly spot the intellectual theft. That would just be stupid.

I came to know last week that my advisor wrote the paper herself and got it published.

If you believe that your advisor has stolen credit for another person's work—your friend, her former student, or a stranger from Zanzibar—it would be appropriate for you (or better yet, your friend) to speak discreetly to your department head or another trusted senior faculty member, with both the original dissertation and your advisor's publication in hand, asking them to clarify the ethical boundaries. Do not accuse; such accusations are very serious, and your advisor's colleagues may react defensively on her behalf. Instead, explain the delicacy of the situation and ask for guidance. And then listen.

They may react badly anyway, but then you have your answer.

If they agree that your advisor has acted unethically, get out of the way. This is not your fight.

Is it common in academia to do this?

No. I won't claim they never happen, obviously, but serious breaches of ethical behavior, at the level you are accusing, are extremely rare.

Q3 One more question i have is should i be listed as co-author for all papers coming out of this research because i developed the apps that formed basis for this research. I mean the concept for them was not mine but i did program them.

That is a more subtle question. As a general rule, I would say no. Of course you deserve credit for your contributions, but only once for each contribution. If your contribution is a key piece of software, then the first paper that uses that software should describe that software in detail and include you as a coauthor. If you walk away after that first paper, later work that relies on your software—by your advisor or anyone else—need not list you as a coauthor; you already got credit. With good reason, Stephen Wolfram is not a coauthor on every paper that uses Mathematica. You should of course be cited in any paper that uses, builds on, or improves your work, but that's a separate issue from coauthorship.

But reality is rarely so cut and dried. Is moving the software to a new platform a sufficient contribution? Optimizing the underlying algorithms? Adding a new, easy-to-implement feature suggested by your advisor? Adding a new, hard-to-implement feature suggested by your advisor? Adding support for a new input device? I have no idea. You and your advisor should have agreed in advance on the contribution required for you to be a coauthor.

Normally, if you had not had this conversation already, I would recommend having it now, but it sounds like it may be too late for that. You may be better off simply walking away and finding a new advisor that you can trust.

Answer 2

I'm not really qualified to assess how other departments would treat single- versus co-authored papers. As for the other points:

[2] It is completely unethical for the advisor to submit a journal article based on work done by a student as solely her own, even if she were entirely responsible for writing the paper. Being a single author implies that the author is responsible for the entire content of the work described, referring to both research and preparation of the manuscript.

[3] Your rights to being credited for this work depend on the nature and scope of the work that you individually did. If you simply built the apps once, and then did no subsequent work on the project, then you are entitled to a paper credit for a work describing the tools and how they were used (in part or in whole). However, unless you have been doing ongoing development on these tools, you would not be entitled to receive authorship credit whenever the work is used. (You would, however, be entitled to a citation on the use of your work in future publications!)