Aftermath of rightfully submitting a solo paper without my advisor's name

Question

After reading this question and this I haven't find my answer.

My advisor hasn't contributed to my work and I know that my work isn't significant and it won't publish in top journals. But I want to publish it without my advisor's name in a conference.

So my question is not about automatically coauthor my advisor or having high hopes on my individual work.

The Problem arise from here. We have to enroll in some seminar classes before starting to work on our thesis. In one of those classes our teacher said:

1. "No matter what you do, you have to enlist your advisor's name in your papers because unless it would considered as a work with no supervisor and it can not be trusted."

2. "In interview we have for PhD students, if the person who is applying hasn't written the name of his suprevisor we doubt him. Either he is a genius or he is hiding something or he is too active in his field."

3. "In some companies and research labs everyone add the name of their fundraiser to show him their gratitude, so should we.".

So based on what I heard I'm going to face serious problems if I publish my work individually as a student. The question is:

1. Apart from being unethical including a name of person who didn't contribute to work as a coauthor, does it have any academic weight? I mean, does it value my work if I say I did it alone or it does not have any different until coauthor isn't a student.

2. Is it true that I am going to be accused as a not genuine person if I don't add my advisor's name? Because our teacher told us that he and his colleagues don't consider these kind of submitted papers trustworthy and genuine, so don't look at them carefully and mostly reject them on sight.

Edit:

Conclusion: Thank you all. I think my vision is more clear now. The right way is not the opposite of the wrong way. It means despite "spoon-fed" "a very distorted view", the right thing to do is not doing the opposite.

I decided to do my best to play as a team, because of its mentioned benefits, especially for my first paper. But if working as a team doesn't go well, there is no harm in solo publishing or getting some new advisers.

Answer 1

I don't think your problem is with your advisor. Your real problem is with teachers in classes who say things like:

• No matter what you do, you have to enlist your advisor's name in your papers because unless it would considered as a work with no supervisor and it can not be trusted."

• "In interview we have for PhD students, if the person who is applying hasn't written the name of his suprevisor we doubt him. Either he is a genius or he is hiding something or he is too active in his field."

• "In some companies and research labs everyone add the name of their fundraiser to show him their gratitude, so should we.".

In light of all the recent debate about whether we are too idealized and rosy in our views of academia, let me at least say this:

Whether or not this is common practice in the areas you work in, the problem here is the rationale being used to justify author inclusion. In no way is the decision being made based on some notion of contribution by the advisor (either financial or moral, or in any form). It's being based purely on a notion of patronage or bias.

The person making these claims has either a very distorted view of how authorship works, or is misleading new students in a terrible way.

Answer 2

Apart from being unethical including a name of person who didn't contribute to work as a coauthor, does it have any academic weight?

You use very strong words, but things are not black and white. You are a student and most likely you do not know how to write a good paper. Why not involve your supervisor in the writing process? You can write the original manuscript and he will make the final version, since he is more experienced than you. In that setting you are still first author, he does contribute and he is co-author, your paper has more chances to be published and everyone is happy.

Is it true that I am going to be accused as a not genuine person if I don't add my advisor's name?

You are exaggerating again. If your paper will be rejected it will most likely be because it is not good enough and not because of your name. There is always the possibility that someone with no previous experience is easier to get his paper rejected (I believe many reviewers do a Google search on the person they are reviewing) but that mostly applies to big conferences. For smaller conferences or workshops criteria are not that strict.

But you have not thought the most critical factor. What if your paper gets accepted? Who will then pay for your conference registration and trip? Usually it is the advisor that provides such funding. If you submit it solo, you must do the entire process with the university bureaucracy alone and without support from some faculty member it will be much harder for the university to actually cover your expenses.

So, although I disagree with some of the comments your seminar tried to spoon-feed you, in the long run it will be better to play as a team member. So, involve your supervisor, make him actually contribute on the notion that you will still be first author. This cooperation might even vastly improve your paper and then it might get accepted even in a top conference or journal. In this setting, you will have more to win than to lose.

Answer 3

In scientific publications, at least, "author contribution" statements are becoming more and more common. These statements list the exact contributions that each author on the paper made. A number of excellent examples are provided on this Nature blog post: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/11/post_12.html

If you included your supervisor as an author on the paper, providing such a statement would allow you to clarify the nature of your roles.

Answer 4

It might be worth pointing out the existence of the Vancouver Protocol (first described by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, this is becoming more widely accepted). This protocol states

Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to
1) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and to
2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on
3) final approval of the version to be published.
Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author.

This is quite restrictive, and clearly discourages some of the attributions that your teachers appear to encourage.

That said, it is important for a scientist at the start of his/her career to be very aware of the value of collaboration - working closely with your advisor (to the point where their contribution warrants co-authorship) is quite likely to improve the quality of your paper. If you believe it would not, then maybe you need to question your choice of advisor.

It is no doubt true that a person with a good publications record carries more weight in their chosen field, and that their papers will be read more carefully and cited more frequently. Because of this it is often considered a good idea to start out in this mode.

Personal note: in the 80s when I did my PhD, email wasn't yet a thing. My advisor was abroad for almost an entire year, and I did in fact independently write and publish a paper. The work in this paper was very good (I can say so in retrospect after more than 20 years), but I was a complete unknown - and it had incredibly narrow applicability. To this date, it has received just one citation. I still believe I was correct (given the circumstance) not to include my advisor's name on the paper, but it did nothing for my career (or the field). It would have been better if I had waited until he returned, discussed and improved the paper, and published jointly.

There is a lot that an experienced person can do merit co-authorship - but you have to create the opportunity for them to do so.

Answer 5

First of all, pretty much all the justifications your teacher gave to you are lies. This person is trying to encourage you to put your supervisors' names on your papers, but avoiding telling you that you have to do so because it is the rule.

Secondly, there are roughly three ways a paper can be written as a grad student.

• The student does some work and publishes it, but the supervisor is responsible for lots of guidance, planning, editing, making sure the work gets done, suggesting the original question, helping to place the paper, etc. This is how almost everyone's first paper gets written. The supervisor will almost always be an author, and everyone accepts that this is fair. (However, I have known some generous supervisors who decline an author credit in such cases, since they regard what they did as part of supervising, and not a specific contribution to authoring the paper).
• The student and supervisor collaborate, similarly to how to colleagues would collaborate (but perhaps with the student doing more of the 'grunt work' and the supervisor making more of the decisions). Both are authors.
• The student does work independently, perhaps asking for some limited advice or proofreading. The supervisor should not be an author, but often is in practice.

Most people except the very gifted start off with the first type, and everyone except those who don't progress very far should have some of the latter two types by the end of a PhD.

So if someone has only publications with their supervisor, it could be taken as meaning that they didn't do much independent work, but it could also be that they had to 'give credit' to their supervisor, or that they work in an area where most papers are collaborative.

If someone has only publications without their supervisor, it might be seen as positive, but it could also be assumed that their supervisor was generous in not taking credit, therefore neutral. If you are known to be a genius, the fact that your early publications were on your own will be mentioned, but it won't prove that you are a genius if this isn't already accepted.

The implied lack of credibility 'that your supervisor didn't approve of your work' would be a very strange reaction. It's only something you should worry about if there's some other reason you might come across as a maverick - for example all your papers are serious work about some topic beloved of conspiracy theorists, or you went straight into grad school from high school, etc. In these cases, you might want to make sure that some form of reflected legitimacy is evident.

If some has a combination of supervisor-included and -not-included work, it would be seem as normal.

In other words, no case is really a strong indicator of your strength.

Your last problem is what you should do. Your teachers are behaving unethically, but your best option is probably to go along with it. Just make sure that you can justify your authorship of the papers you consider yours, if asked in an interview. If so, anyone who takes the time to do so will probably figure out what your supervisor's contribution was, and won't assume that you were playing the same game.