Asking for removal from acknowledgement

Question

In most fields, I think, it is common to use the acknowledgement section to thank everyone for their input who contributed to the paper but did not enough to warrant co-authorship. As a biostatistician working in medicine, however, I have experienced it several times that researchers want to include me as a co-author, although I have not contributed anything or do not even agree with the methods they used, just to make the impression that they have a professional statistician on board. In these situations, I refuse authorship, which usually puts an end to the debate.

Recently, there was one of these cases where a researcher used a methodology that was in my view inferior and even wrong and refused to follow my suggestions. They accepted my rejection of authorship, but wrote in the acknowledgement that they "thank LuckyPal for statistical support".

I feel taken advantage of, and it smells of academic misconduct. However, the journal (a quite reputable one) has no policy of requiring consent of people named in the acknowledgement section. The phrasing "statistical support" is probably broad enough to allow for interpretations that come close to the truth, so it is not plain wrong. If the authors would actually contact the journal to change the acknowledgement, it will at least look somewhat fishy from the journal's perspective.

Is it legitimate to demand to be removed from the acknowledgement?

Follow-Up

Thank you for the very helpful dicussion here. I asked the first author to remove my name from the acknowledgements. They first suggested to remove my name and instead thank the institute, were I am employed. This suggestion has further increased my suspicion that their goal was not to actually acknowledge my time and effort. The director of my institute disagreed with this suggestion. The author then contacted the journal, which has now actually removed the statement about statistical support or expertise from the acknowledgement completely.

I am glad that it all went well without further escalation. I will refrain from collaborating with this research group in the future.

Answer 1

The purpose of the acknowledgements is to acknowledge help and support from other people and funders. In this case the authors' did exactly that and correctly acknowledged your support. The fact that you are mentioned in the acknowledgements does not imply that you endorse the paper and therefore there is generally no need (and no policy) of journals to check whether the people acknowledged in the paper endorse the paper.

However, moving forward you might want to make your statistical support contingent on you signing off on the final manuscript even when you are not an author. That way you can control whether your name appears as part of the paper or not, and whether the language in the acknowledgments accurately represents your contribution. While in theory acknowledgements do not equal endorsement, I agree that there is (very small) implied endorsement by simply being associated with it. For example, I would not like my name appear in a fundamentally unethical study that's going to make the world wide news.

Answer 2

First, I disagree with the other answer.

To your question: Is it legitimate to demand to be removed from the acknowledgement?

You should object to being acknowledged without your permission. For example, my agency has a federal policy against listing people in the acknowledgments without their consent (listed here). Furthermore, I have had people confirm that I did obtain permission to list people in the acknowledgments of papers.

I also remember reading on an American Statistical Association list server (whose location I do not remember is behind a membership wall for privacy) that a biostatistician/statistician should NEVER accept acknowledgements. As illustrated by your example, acknowledgements give you liability (such as people thinking you approve of their method) without reward (specifically being granted coauthorship).

If the authors refuse to remove you, contact the editor to the journal and ask to be removed. Hopefully that will work and a correct version of the manuscript will be published. If that does not works, here are some options:

• Depending upon the amount of effort you want to put into your work, write a response article criticizing the paper.
• Raise ethic concerns with journal, your employer, and ethical employer.
• Do a formal ethics complaint with their professional society if they hold membership.
• Complaint to the funding agency (such as NIH in the US).

Lastly, if you do not want to do that much work and stop after contacting the journal, you might just blacklist the people and refuse to help them ever again.

Sadly, you learned through the "school of hard knocks" why acknowledgements give you liability without reward for statistics.

Edits based upon comments:

1. In the Policy, "Individuals listed in the acknowledgements section should be notified before the scientific information product is released or published." implies the person also gives their consent to be listed. I do not have a formal citation for this policy, but have been told this interpretation by people who enforce the policy.

2. Statistical consultation for ad hoc analysis or questions about methods by itself would only be acknowledgements, but in the survey statisticians are usually involved with the study design, interpretation of results, and writing the paper.