International standards relating to a professor publishing a student's thesis work without the student as co-author

Question

I am looking for international standards that speak specifically of a professor taking the thesis work of an ex-student that they had supervised and publishing a journal paper on that work (and just that work) without the student's name.

This relates to a specific case that I am aware of where the official university finding essentially admits that the aforementioned incident did indeed take place (it is largely undeniable), and quotes some generic definitions and policies regarding plagiarism, but finds that the aforementioned incident does not imply plagiarism and/or academic misconduct (due mainly to a supposition that the student did nothing more than grunt work, which I don't believe to be true at all, which contradicts the university's own expectations for the academic title obtained by the student, etc.).

The finding is an obvious attempt to sweep the case under the carpet.

However, the fact that this is clearly a case of plagiarism is sort of "folklore" to me and I cannot find something authoritative to back it up (lots of blog posts, etc., but no statement that speaks specifically to this sort of case written by an authority that an official from a well-respected university would be reluctant to explicitly discount or contradict).

Aside from my gut, my question then is: does this sort of scenario constitute plagiarism and/or academic misconduct with respect to some specific international standard?

(I would very much appreciate answers with pointers to a statement from a well-known professional organisation, reputable university, high-profile journal, etc. The specific area is Computer Science, just in case.)

Answer 1

There is no international standard because authorship practices vary.

COPE is the closest thing to a standards organization, but they do not publish authorship standards, or any other kind of standard.

References:

https://publicationethics.org/files/Recognise_Potential_Authorship_Problems.pdf

https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/best_practice_for_issues_around_theses_publishing%20(1).pdf

Academia varies more than you think it does – The Movie (why there are no standards)

Publishing a student's thesis without their name is certainly unethical.

Answer 2

Journals/conferences or arXiv and other repositories may have explicit rules regarding plagiarism. Since you mention that the field is computer science, the list below has a few pointers.

If the university has found that the plagiarism incident took place, there should be emails or other paper trails that document the incident (or the MSc thesis itself). Such document can be shared with the editor of the journal where the work is submitted, even after acceptance or publication. If the editor does not investigate, it would be always possible to repeat with the next editor as new editors may have some power over previously accepted papers. (Of course, in the editor investigates, do not keep sending the complaints to new editors if you are unhappy with the first investigation).

• For IEEE conferences and publications, the page https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/plagiarism/plagiarism.html appears to be the official go-to document
• For instance http://cvpr2020.thecvf.com/submission/main-conference/author-guidelines has a pointer pointing to the link in the previous bullet.
• the AMS (Americam Mathematical Society) at http://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/policy-statements/sec-ethics has "The knowing presentation of another person's mathematical discovery as one's own constitutes plagiarism and is a serious violation of professional ethics. Plagiarism may occur for any type of work, whether written or oral and whether published or not." The Committee on Professional Ethics of the AMS is a possible body that would deal with plagiarism complaints.
• https://arxiv.org/help/moderation "Rights to submit material. Submissions to arXiv must be the author’s original work, and users must have the right to grant the rights contained in the selected license. Users must ensure the submission does not, to the best of their knowledge, infringe upon anyone's copyright. Users should not submit comments by referees. Users should not submit plagiarized material."
• https://www.comsoc.org/publications/ieee-communications-society-policy-plagiarism-and-multiple-submissions "pre-publication author misconduct, such as double-submission or plagiarism, will result in rejection of the manuscript(s) and a minimum 6 month ban on submissions to fully-owned IEEE Communications Society publications by the author(s)"
• The exact sentence "All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors" has many matches on google. It may come from a COPE document that is being reused for various conferences/journals ethics document.

Answer 3

On top of getting the paper retracted by the editor as explained above, each research institute will have his rules. Most of the time, those rules can be enforced by law.

Look at the good scientific practices document of the university. That will be the official document that a court would have to refer to. There is probably an ombudsman in charge of the first steps, ultimately a lawyer might be involved.

Answer 4

Authorship

In many fields, the order of authors in a paper indicates how much or how they contributed: The first author usually did most of the work, while the last one is sometimes the supervisor. Other fields order authors alphabetically.

Depending on the field and even the journal, corresponding author can refer to the author who communicated the paper to the journal or the author to whom post-publication communication about the paper by third parties should be addressed (further reading). Among others this results in corresponding authorship being valued in evaluation or for funding (further reading) in some contexts, while this seems bizarre to those used to the other meaning of corresponding author.

In some parts of the world, the PhD supervisor may be the first author even if the PhD student did most of the work.

In some fields, papers with more than a handful of authors are rare. In other fields, one might regularly find papers with dozens or, in extreme cases, even hundreds or thousands of co-authors.

In some fields, the authors’ affiliations on a paper indicate where the work was done; in others, affiliations indicate where the authors can be currently found.

Supervisors should not automatically gain credit as co-authors. Imho, this can even border fraud in a world where publication metrics determine career paths. Authors should be only those who actively contributed text and/or integral analyses for the work presented in papers/books.

Where supervisors discuss or encourage the work, they should be acknowledged. Where the work derives from earlier work of the supervisors, they should be cited. Where supervisors have also written the text or conducted the analyses, they should be co-authors.