This is an update of a query that I had asked few months ago:  In fact I have even adopted some of the suggestions given by @Magicsowon there.  I was advised to make the question to the point, and not include any extra information. This is why I am posting it afresh here with only relevant information and also some new information as the situation has evolved since then.   I have worked as a postdoc in a European university for 6 months. The topic of my research was suggested by my boss and his collaborator, Prof. M. That was their contribution. After that, I went through more than 50-60 papers to find the right paper to build my work on. I have developed the theory and I have finished the computational part. Now, I am writing the paper.  A good analogy would be, it was like going to a conference and there one hears about an interesting problem that deserves serious investigation.  While developing the theory, I sent many drafts containing my derived equations to my main collaborator (my boss), but he hardly commented on them, none useful feedback from him. I do not think he had even read them seriously. Considering that a postdoc is essentially an unsupervised position, and the potential of co-authorship dispute in the future, I sent him a couple of emails asking him to help me with certain aspect of the theory and computational aspect. But, he did not provided any help to me. He had a regular comment during every meeting we had,   "I am aware, I should more actively contribute to the work, but as you can see I am busy with meetings. And I am sure, you can fix this problem."  Also, he did not gave me sufficient freedom to collaborate with other researchers. So, having no help coming from anywhere, I resigned from the job. I had implicitly mentioned to him as well as to the head of the dept. in my resignation email that I had worked all by myself during the 6 months stay at their department, and also that I can do the remaining work by myself. No objection was raised on that from anyone.  Now, I am writing the paper, and my plan is:  1) Write the paper as a single author under the affiliation of the former department where I had finished almost 40% of the work. I cannot gift co-authorship for my hard work of 6-months to anyone as I did not received any major/minor help from anyone. I have checked, this is consistent with the Vancouver recommendations.  2) I will acknowledge my boss and Prof. M in the acknowledgement section of the paper for suggesting me the topic of research. Note: I had just met Prof. M in a conference for 30 minutes or so, we had general discussion about the topic of research. No specific discussion regarding the work I did, no mail correspondence between him and me. However if I am not wrong, he is the actual brain behind the project, and I had tried to visit him and collaborate with him closely. But my boss did not facilitated that either. Also, note that my boss and Prof. M have worked together in most of their papers in the last 2-3 years. And my boss is the director of a research unit in which Prof. M is a member too.  3) I will also acknowledge the research unit of my boss for funding the research.  Is it fair, honest and sufficient? If the paper is published, can he claim authorship by writing to the editor? I am pretty sure he can almost show nothing about the evidence of the contribution other than suggesting the topic of research, if asked.  And the traces of this problem have off shoot to become another problem. See,
123469
I am a postdoc at a European University. However, I am planning to quit my postdoc in a month or so since the research environment and the city life is not to me liking.  Also, I work with a Professor who is very polite, but also very busy with meetings. My salary comes from the project he administers, so he is the boss of the organization and the project.  For the past four months I have been working on a problem day and night including weekends as I found the problem very interesting and challenging. The theoretical part of the work is complete. It is a "complete" solution. He had NO contribution at all in this. Not even a single email exchange. He is too busy with meetings all the time. He is in the department twice a week for two to three hours at a time. I am also managing his master student as he has no time.   He is definitely polite and nice though, but I have not received any input from him other than giving me printed research papers. But he always asked me to give him the PDFs of lengthy derivations which I did. But I am dealing with analytical/numerical Navier-Stokes equation and its variations, so you can imagine how much terse that is. He has the entire theory now with him from my work. He may have been a good researcher in the past but no contribution to this work. And he had no proper publication in the work that I am doing so I am not sure how much he can contribute in writing the paper.  Now remains the numerical part which I believe I can do in next 2/3 weeks. And I have the ability to write the paper by myself when I have the numerical solution.  I talked to him and asked if I can work for him based in another city. He said if it is a week visit, that is fine, but not otherwise. He said it clearly that "I will not pay you to work somewhere else."  I still have a cordial relationship with him. No worries on that part. So, I am going to leave the place and the position in a month or two for sure.  So, he gains co-authorship just because he has the authority to provide employment? What should I do? Please help. I could have continued to live in the city though it was little boring for me, provided I was able to get inputs from my collaborator, or if he had given me necessary freedom to collaborate with other researchers, which he hasn't.    Update 10th June, I have resigned now. This problem has evolved into a new stage. Please post your replies there:    and
16986
One of the hot-button issues on this site is standards for coauthorship, especially variants of the question "Must I automatically include my thesis advisor as a coauthor on all my papers?"   Since these questions (sensibly) come up again and again, I thought it would be useful to have a collection of links to various ethical standards for coauthorship.  To the best of my knowledge, these standards will apply only to one particular academic field and/or to one geographic region.  For instance, most of my colleagues would point to .  It applies (explicitly) to mathematics and (implicitly, I think) to mathematics done in the US and by Americans.    I was thinking of a community-wiki question where each answer posts a link to ethical standards in some academic field(s) and geographic region(s).  To make the answers better, I would ask that respondents:   Quote in their answer the passages most relevant to coauthorship.   Please avoid "alphabet soup".  Above I wrote "American Mathematical Society" rather than "AMS": mathematicians will know what AMS means, but most other academics presumably won't.  Some other answers here refer to things like "BMJ": I certainly didn't know what that was.     (Ideally) Give commentary as to whether/how the standards in their answer differ from those posted in other answers.     The more comprehensive the list we can compile, the more authoritatively we can point future questioners to this list and tell them what is or is not an ethical practice.
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I  am a PhD student in Mathematics. I have found one advisor in my local University who does not know my research field at all, but  has allowed me to choose my own problems and solve them independently. Initially, I was quite happy as I didn't need to switch places (which I don't want at all). The problem started when my advisor could not assist me in solving the problems I chose. It even happened that I chose a problem to work on and when I told him about it, he said that's an excellent problem and I should solve it.Later on after meeting another professor  in this field he told me that it has been solved long before and hence I had no point working on that again. He does listen to me when I say something about the problems but fails to give me any critical feedback in my topic. I searched the web but there are so many directions of the topic I am working on, I am feeling puzzled which way to go. Moreover there is no research group existing in this field in my local University with whom I can discuss or get some inputs abut my problems. I am unable to answer the following questions of mine which is affecting my research considerably:  1.Has my decision to stay in my hometown and not go to reputed institutes and talking to experienced professors backfired on me? How can I come out of this situation? 2.Is  PhD done in this way only without any help from anyone ?At least my advisor says so.  Any comments/advice will be helpful.
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I just received the following comment from an Elsevier editor &quot;The manuscript does not reach the required quality standard of this journal.&quot;. To my mind say just that or nothing is pretty much the same considering the minimum requirements for data openness and transparency. there is already a good explanation of the submission process here:  However, as an automated process, is prone to flaws as well as to improvements. And does not explain in detail the received comment stated above. Any thoughts on deciphering the comment stated above are greatly appreciated. thank you EDIT: When I posted this question I forgot to add an essential and relevant fact to this conversion, which is: many and many scientific researchers don't have the opportunity to develop their research works in a team or even do it collaboratively. They have to rely on themselves to present their findings and defend their thesis. And everyone here is acquainted with the syndrome of  &quot;tunnel effect&quot; when writing. So having someone, that can give a small contribution to unlocking someone else research writing, I see as a welcoming behavior that can only benefit the scientific community at the individual level.
6821
Question:  Are there any guidelines, sources, or examples of good practices for maintaining theorist's research notebook?  Motivation and context:  Maintaining a  is a much advised (if not a vital) tool for doing research. Many do that nowadays also in . While the methods for writing and maintaining a labbook might differ in details, in "dirty-hands" (no offense!) experimental, or field disciplines, the basics are relatively straightforward and clear. The advice tends to boil down to keep a labbook per single topic one works on and then record all the experiments and thoughts related to those experiments into the notebook. Simplifying a lot, in the end, the researcher (team) would compile a paper from the notes in the notebook.  Now situation of a researcher in a more theoretical discipline is strikingly different. Usually one engages in research on several topics at the same time. The problems a researcher works on are often intertwined and one's view on them changes over time, often merging originally separate streams of thought into a single one, or vice-versa. The work revolves not around experiments which would have a clear objective, but rather around currently prepared papers and then "a cloud of ideas". In summary, theorist's workstyle tends to be very non-linear. Maintaining some kind of a notebook is still a good thing, if for nothing else, then for not forgetting about stuff. My question is about how to go about doing it.  I am after a practical tool helping me to archive my thought process for long-term, as well as efficiently manage and keep an overview of the evolution of the several interacting topics I engage in.
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I am PhD student in my final months, and I know that I don't want to stay in academia forever. However, I wouldn't mind doing a postdoc for two or three years, because I really like the academic work.  I have written a postdoctoral fellowship proposal together with my potential future host. The host has agreed to fund 1 year from her own funds, while the fellowship pays for another year. A few days ago, I have been awarded this fellowship.   In the meantime, I have also applied for industry positions (as I wasn't sure whether I get the fellowship), have recently had an interview and just now I got a job offer ready to sign.  Now, I have to choose between the two, and I am inclined to take the industry position and to leave academia for good - because the company has been on my "wish list" for many years and I potentially might regret having declined the job offer in a few years.  However, I am not sure whether this is fair towards the professor, as she has invested a fair amount of time into the proposal. I have not told her anything about the fellowship outcome nor the job offer. Could I still decline the fellowship without bad feelings, or have I already committed myself into this postdoc?  somewhat related:  Please note, I have not signed anything yet, so I am asking from a moral rather than a legal perspective.
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I'd just submitted a manuscript to  Journal on Mar. 1st, 2015. Right after 1 month, its status changed to Under Review. I just waited up to Jan. 2016 and send a letter to editor-in-chief to clear the status of the paper and any potential problem due to this delay. He did say this after that 10 months!:     you are right with your criticism. However your paper deals with   research topics, where only a few of roboticist are familiar with.   Hopefully we can get now the final required review. Sorry for the   inconvenience.   Now, 2 extra months are passed, yet the paper's status is still Under Review.  They should have considered responsibility regarding the case. They could easily announce us about their inability to find any interested reviewer for the manuscript, and we would find the other journal. I'm frustrated a little bit. As a matter of fact, I am reluctant to withdraw the submission as they have wasted my time, NOTICEABLY, over the last year. I wonder if they have completely neglected it.   Is there any way to handle this case, and ask them POLITELY and REASONABLY, leading to the finalization of this manuscript's situation?  Thanks  Edit: After 2 weeks from sending an email to the editor about the manuscript, he has not still replied.
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Please submit, with the manuscript, the names, addresses (including   countries), and e-mail addresses of five potential referees who are   outside the authors' institutions and must not have conflict of   interest with the authors.   Do you think I should name 5 researchers from a similar area that are not affiliated with my university and co-authors? Is this what referees are?
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We had a master's student working on our project.  He set up a database for us, and wrote some of the initial code with me in a pair programming session.  At one point, he had more commits to the repository than any of the other students working on the project.  Then he went to do an internship for the summer, and after that my advisor did not want to keep him on the project for some reason, even though I thought he was friendly and easy to work with.  My advisor chose not to list him as a coauthor, and put him in the acknowledgements section instead.  However, there was another guy (a professor) who didn't write any code at all, and wasn't there throughout most of the project, but he wrote the introduction and related work sections for us, and he got listed as a coauthor, even though he probably did a day's worth of work on the project (maybe two).  In fact, my advisor gave him the coveted last author position, even though my advisor came up with the idea and directed the whole project.  What determines who gets put as a coauthor, and who gets put in the acknowledgement sections?
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I am in the field of computer science. It is often the case when I am reading a paper I start to wonder, "Wow stunning results, however, I would like to prove that." or "How exactly did he get these amazing results? He/she just wrote a rough overview of the real methodology used in this paper.". As you can see, a lot of times the small things have a huge impact on the overall performance of the underlying methodology. Often they are not part of the paper or not revealed at all.  My idea would be to contact the paper writer, to ask for his research programs to recreate them and understand them. Can/should I do that?   I personally think that there are probably not a lot of researchers, who would let somebody else "look at their cards". What's your experience with that?
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Can I put the name of my baby as one of the co-authors of a scientific paper?  I know it sounds disturbing, but it's a way of mine to protest against co-authors that haven't made any contribution (they haven't even read it or are part of the research area) to a paper, but they are part of the research group.  What are the legal / ethic concerns?  So technically I was writing the paper with my baby in my hand and the baby was talking with me in its own language. The baby even wrote a few characters in the paper when it managed to get near the keyboard while I was holding it.
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this is a follow up to the problem described .  I have the same problem and the proposed solution does not completely solve the problem. I mean, it does solve the problem but also creates another one. The new problem is that the theorems, lemmas and the rest are placed in such as way that they are not cut (of course), but this leaves then big empty spaces in many pages. So the problem is that, the problem described  does not seem to be fully resolved using the nocut option.   Do you any of you have a good idea on how to solve this?  Thanks!
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I recently came across several papers in the area of Information Extraction and Data Mining which seem to have passed the review process even if they (1) use some new terminology without describing it, (2) replicate some old and popular technique and just describe it in a new way, (3) use new datasets without releasing them publicly or describing them in detail, (4) confusing language that doesn't seem to describe the methods... and much more.   Why challenge them? Such papers give these people a kind of leverage in situations where number of publications count rather than quality of genuine work. They also encourage, let's say, 'pseudoscience' within the scientific community - or fraud, as those more experienced among you say.  I've faced situations like:-   Someone hired me from a freelance site to implement a previously published paper. The paper doesn't adequately describe the novel methods they claim. I spend a week on it but don't get paid.  Similar situation but the implementation's accuracy doesn't match the claim. In a semi-academic gathering (tea time in a summer school), a discussion turned into a debate. Though I wasn't involved in it, one of the others said something which I pointed out as being logically wrong. It turned personal and one of them claimed that they knew better because of having twice the number of papers than me. Later when I read their papers I found that they didn't contain any ideas that would count as a genuine research.    I guess some of you might have been in similar situations before. Yes it doesn't matter in the longer term; but it is hard to avoid some situations like this and I think it might be hampering the research community as a whole.   Here are the exact points of my question:   Should we confront such publications? Would we get anything out of it?  Is it even feasible?   How can I do so? What actions are possible in such cases? What is the best course of action?   p.s. Yes citations matter more than just throwing papers - but such publications also get citations from other equally content-less papers published in similar conferences.   pps. Most of these papers are from less-than-tier-3 level conferences but still published by top publishers like IEEE and Springer.
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When meeting some scientists in person, I've had good conversations with decisions upon interesting plans for research cooperation and personal visits. But then, subsequent contact by e-mail is difficult, where the other party either doesn't reply at all, or very slowly (several weeks +). However, when I then meet them again at a later date, they are still enthusiastic about the project (where the bulk of the work is mine) and a short in-person discussion makes more progress than the past months of (lack of) e-mail have. So it appears that a lack of interest in the project does not explain the lack of response. The project is scientifically interesting, fits with my PhD, and the visit enhances my chances of finding a post-doc after my PhD (it's a very good institute for my field).  I understand that many scientists are very busy and flooded by e-mail, but it feels sad to abandon a potentially interesting project just because communication by e-mail is not working well. I'm quite sure it would work if I were in the same building. What strategies exist to mitigate this problem? I can think of:   Try to ask a common acquaintance to poke him/her (my local colleague has a shared friend with him/her). Pro: Might get indirect feedback as to why the irresponsiveness. Con: involves 3rd party (may or may not be on-site) not necessarily involved. Send reminder e-mails (did you see my e-mail from 20 February?). Pro: increases chances of being noticed. Con: may be considered annoying Phone. Pro: hard to run away. Con: I don't like phoning and I don't like being phoned. E-mail someone sitting in the neighbouring office. Pro: neighbour has small step to irresponsive scientist. Con: a bit strange to involve someone I don't even know Give up on the project. Con: means no project and no visit. Try to do the project without their input. Pro: no need for communication. Con: might waste a lot of time by trying known dead-ends that I'm not aware of.    What other options exist? What advantages and disadvantages have I not thought of? What is wise to do?
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Two months ago I submitted a manuscript to my advisor for reviewing and submitting to a journal. He didn’t reply to that and when I asked him about it, he said we should think about publishing after two months and we don’t need to rush. He didn’t even bother to look into my paper.  I feel very anxious and have written a second paper this time with no discussion or involvement from him. I have put his name in the acknowledgement section for allowing me to use his lab computer. Do I stand a chance in publishing it without his name? The idea was never discussed by us and his involvement in this paper is almost not existent.  I have only a year to graduate and am worried for job hunting without publications. (About the quality of paper: Last year, when I came up with an idea, he rejected it claiming it was not good enough; six months later I saw it published by someone else. This time I am confident of getting accepted in reputed journals.)
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About 3 months ago, my co-author and I submitted a mathematical paper to a journal. Yesterday, we got the editor's response and the paper has been rejected. The reason is that the referee thinks that our results are wrong or trivial.  However, we carefully read the referee's report and we conclude that the "errors" pointed out by the referee are not errors at all and that our proofs are correct. In all modesty, we think that the referee understood very poorly even the statements of our theorems.  Personally, this is the first time that such a situation occurs to me. I already have four papers published in such journal and the reports I got from the referees have been always really accurate.  What do you think is the best thing to do? Forget about and try another journal? Write an e-mail to the editor explaining why we disagree with the decision? Other ideas?  EDIT: Thank you very much for all your answers. At the end, we submitted our paper to another journal with only some slight edits we have already planned to do independently by the referee's report.
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I joined a research group of a faculty member in 201x, and worked with her for three years. During that time, I collaborated with a large hospital to perform research in the domain of medical informatics. I spoke about my research at two conferences; one was a talk, and the other was a poster presentation. My advisor asked me to write up the research in a paper around the second year, which I did. Around the third year, I decided to switch research groups, because of the relationship between me and my advisor going sour, and not having funding from her (I used to work part-time to fund my PhD research).  Once this happened, she withdrew her support from me publishing my paper and ordered that I give up my work to a fellow grad student. I told her, that my manuscript is in its Nth revision, and that I would like to take it to completion as first author. She was dismissive and didn’t offer any comments on my work. I told her, that, should I pass on my work, I would like to discuss authorship issues in advance, which she wasn’t ready to discuss. She ganged up my new advisor against me, and together they forced me to give up my code, results, paper drafts. I had to then leave the university without a degree.  Fast forward couple of years, I receive an email from a student in her lab (the student whom I had to hand over my work to), saying that they are publishing a paper, and have decided I am the fourth author. I read the paper and found out that it uses my experimental setup and design, data collection, and one of the ideas I had presented (the idea wasn’t the main crux of my paper, but I believe it was novel).  I want to   Publish my original draft in ArXiv/BioArXiv, as first author. Request my advisor to cite my work in their publication.    Given how she behaved with me, I know that despite what I am asking for sounds fair, she is likely to object.  I am asking the community: Can I go ahead and ArXiv it without her permission? I could add her as an author, but not take her permission. Also, if you have any other ideas on how to deal with this situation please let me know.  (For the record, this was at a top-10 school in the US in an engineering department).