Near the end of my PhD, I want to leave the program, take my work with me, and my advisor says that he lost all of my drafts [closed]

Question

My advisor has been neglectful throughout my program, and unfortunately, switching advisors was never an option. He provided no scientific guidance, only emailing me every six months to tell me to submit a thesis and graduate. I believe he underestimated my abilities, assuming I wouldn’t produce significant work, so he didn’t bother helping, thinking he wouldn’t benefit from a noteworthy paper.

Despite this, I persisted and worked independently, relying on occasional external guidance. After years of effort, I managed to produce original work. At conferences, external professors who saw my presentations encouraged me to publish, recognizing the value of my contributions.

When I shared my drafts with my advisor (without my name on them), he became resentful, likely realizing he hadn’t contributed to my progress. He belittled my work and started pressuring me to submit a thesis and make a public defense. Now, just one month before my deadline, I still haven’t published my work to secure intellectual ownership. My main concern is that during a public defense, anyone in the audience—especially those experienced in publishing—could steal my ideas and publish them themselves, leaving me with nothing.

After much thought, I’m considering leaving the program. I no longer care about the degree; I care about protecting my work. The university itself is low-ranking, and I would rather publish independently and apply for a PhD elsewhere.

Recently, I asked my advisor to return my old drafts, especially since I’ve learned that other PhD students are now working in the same area. I fear he may share my drafts with them so they can include his name as a coauthor. He claimed that he either returned the drafts to me or lost them entirely. I firmly told him I never received them, emphasized that this is my original work, and questioned how he could lose them so easily.

I’m devastated and deeply distrust him at this point. I suspect he might either use my work himself or pass it on to others, and I get nothing. He said he would look for my drafts again, but I have no confidence in him.

What should I do?

What are my options? please don't tell me that I should have left, I know but I don't have the time to fall in regret, I want to get out with minimum losses. My work is more important than the degree for my future career. Since he doesn't want to give me my drafts. there is a probability that he has given it to students or he is taking revenge on me.

I plan to extract two papers from my thesis, where one paper depends on the other. My goal is to submit the independent paper before finalizing my thesis. However, with the stress of this situation and this being my first paper, I need help with the writing process.

Would it be appropriate to contact a professor I briefly met at a conference, who is also an editor for the journal I intend to submit to, and ask for their opinion or comments on my work before submission? Additionally, I hope that their acknowledgment of my work could serve as a safeguard for my intellectual property in case someone tries to claim or steal my ideas.

Is this a reasonable approach?

I am in the middle-east working in numerical optimization.

Answer 1

First, don't walk away from years of work. Get the degree now, if you're close, rather than having to start all over somewhere else.

Second, you are publishing your work as part of your PhD thesis. If others do take your work as inspiration for their own work, you can always point to your published thesis to say that you were first.

Third, it does not happen very often that others "steal" an idea and publish it as their own. That's because it takes quite a lot of work to do that: You have to understand another person's idea, repeat the experiments made, and then write it all up. That likely takes a year or more. You will have plenty of time after your PhD defense to get your stuff published first, before anyone else could do that based on your presentations.

Answer 2

To be honest, I think you are being a bit paranoid. If you have left any public record, you can refer to it. In particular a completed thesis, and its defense is a public record.

Your best option is to finish the thesis ASAP and defend it. Perhaps submit a pre-print of a possible publication to arXiv or similar. Or leave copies of your drafts with another professor whom you trust.

Note that you don't own "ideas". You hold copyright to certain expressions of those ideas, but the ideas themselves are free to use (exception in the case of patents).

Note also that parallel work in research is common in academia, even in independent institutions, and one sometimes gets "scooped" in offering them for publication. Those who do get scooped need to move on, usually with extensions of those ideas for which they are probably well placed.

But, publication doesn't, in fact, give you ownership of the ideas. It gives you a claim of priority.

Note that it would be misconduct for anyone to represent your ideas as their own, whether that is the advisor or one of their students. But, you need to finish, and you are most likely the one farthest ahead in the race, should one occur.

Leaving your program seems to me to be the absolute worst option. It will set you back in time and let those which similar thoughts about your research area catch up to you.

Answer 3

There are a few reasons what you are suggesting is, I think, a bad idea.

If your supervisor really did want to steal your work, they could just photocopy your drafts. I certainly don't carefully file drafts given to me by students, I usually just throw them away after giving comments, they are drafts!

At many Universities, you cannot use work from before you started your PhD, on your PhD, so you can't just go start over somewhere else and keep your existing work, you'd have to write a fresh PhD. Also, I would personally never accept a new PhD student who had dropped out of their previous PhD just a month before finishing, without an extremely good reason -- and you don't seem to have a good reason to not just finish in your current location.

While it will take some time for your final PhD to be published, that will happen a lot faster than any alternative, and also get you a PhD, which (as I said above) there is a very good chance you will not get anywhere else.

Answer 4

Before I really start, I'll say that I'm sorry you find yourself in such an upsetting situation.

I don't know what country you're in, or what the academic norms and legal scenarios are there, but in the US, the fruits of your labor tend to belong to the university, not to the individual, which makes your planned course of action a little less appealing.

I get that you don't want people using your stuff without you being properly credited, but to demand that your mentor needs to move on as if you never existed or did any work in the lab comes across as petulant. What you're trying to do is sometimes described in the US as "taking your ball and going home" -- meaning that if you can't "have fun", you'll do everything in your power to make sure nobody else can have fun either.

Further, your mentor, or maybe your school, for better or worse, supported these efforts, and the best outcome is probably for you to make your work available to your group with the understanding that you would be included as an author in any attempt to publish.

If you're worried that efforts will be made to exclude you, or that your mentor will make believe your drafts are his personal work, perhaps a better course of action would be to simple widely distribute your draft to your entire group, thus establishing provenance. Hold on to a copy of the email you use to distribute it. That at least establishes that you have what you need to level an accusation of impropriety with the relevant editors should your work be published without your authorship. Of course, accusing anybody of any form of misconduct is serious business, and should not be undertaken lightly. Note also that as you've presented your work at conferences, you already have published to a certain extent.

There is no guarantee that your mentor won't simply toss your stuff and start fresh if you take this approach, or maybe even try to disguise your contribution, but it may still be a good path.

Trying to get this right, where the work may be likely to see the light of day, and both you and the lab get credit for contributions, is a much more mature path to take than the path you seem to be planning. Look through our archives, and you'll see quite a few cases of an investigator trying to prevent publication in various ways, at the expense of the group. Those are unfortunate cases that can often be avoided and resolved to everyone's satisfaction with rational discussion and maturity.

I feel compelled to add that I agree with others who seem to think that your plan to leave your program is somewhat precipitous, and I gently suggest that if there's a way for you to finish your degree in the near future in your current program, you might strongly consider it. You mention that you're "devastated" by this situation. Some have suggested that you might be overreacting. I have no idea whether you are or aren't, but either way, it might be a mistake to make major decisions while you're devastated. Try to depersonalize the situation, and when you can look at it as an outsider might, that's the time to make your decision. This doesn't mean that I think you need to change your decision. Indeed, you may give this a calm, cool look, and decide that there's no way that you can productively work with a person who is treating you this way, and that leaving is the right thing to do. This is certainly a "do as I say, not as I do" situation, as I have a hard time sometimes making non-emotional decisions myself -- and very much wish I were better at it.

You're in a less-than-ideal situation. It's a real skill to be able to turn a less-than-ideal situation into a somewhat better situation. Those who do stuff like that well tend to be impressive people. In fact, when I'm training undergrads to work on ambitious problems as a team, I try to change their view that a leader does the lion's share of the work, or simply tells everyone what to do to "a good leader is someone that makes bad situations better" (and that's a direct quote from my slides).

Think about how describing your current situation would go over at say, a job interview, or in an application to a new PhD program. You can say "Something bad happened, so I started fresh", or you can say "Something bad happened, and I worked hard to try to save the situation in a way acceptable to everyone involved. Those efforts were successful, and I leaned much from the experience". Which way do you think will reflect better on you? Being very frank, if I were the interviewer, I would simply pass on an interviewee with the first story (it may be the wrong thing to do, but I'd opt for a candidate with less baggage), and probably put somebody with the second story in the positive pile, even if there were some other things in their portfolio that I didn't like. To me, the first is a negative that drowns out positives, and the second is a positive that might even lessen the importance of some of the negatives.

Answer 5

You should follow your advisor’s advice to submit a thesis and make a public defense.

That is kind of the point of doing all the PhD work in the first place. That is what you do when you produce significant work. It is what shows your claim on these ideas.

It is, notably, what you are supposed to do with the PhD work. It is, notably, what your advisor is justified to expect if you want to claim these ideas. Not doing this is, notably, a clear sign to your advisor that you are not going to publish this anytime soon – and that he has to get another student working on it if he or anyone else is supposed to build on it.

Answer 6

My suggestion, learned from experience, is to copyright and patent eveyrthing that can be. You are in a race-condition. The first to file, even if it is a provisional patent, gets the rights.

It's not fair, particularly if a professor delays you while they file patents.

I am not saying this is happening to you, but I have seen it happen with both patents and papers. Professors, stall students on a topic while they, or worse, a friend of theirs publishes a remarkably similar paper - the student only knows that they have been "scooped".

WARNING: You will likely get a hostile reaction from professors that do plagiarize student's papers if you have copyrighted everything before you turn it in. I have noticed the the copyright symbol on the title of your papers seems to provoke continued hostility from such professors. But generally not from professors that do not plagiarize student's papers.