Purely Anecdotal

admin February 14th, 2008

I am wondering what to do about a little situation I am having. Last year a colleague of mine did some experiments that yielded interesting data. He asked me to do some analysis of the data, which I did. Soon thereafter he became more focused on writing and defending his thesis and finding a job, which he did.

Because he was busy with his job and I was already acquainted with his work, he, my adviser and I decided that I would continue this work to make a publishable document. My colleague had designed and implemented the experiments and collected some of the data. I finished up by collecting much more data, analyzing most of the data, and reading and thinking to figure out what was going on and how it fit into the rest of the relevant literature. My colleague had written a few loose paragraphs, but I wrote almost the entire paper.

It comes time to submit for publication and we all decided that the two of us would share authorship. His name would be first, but I could also be considered “first author” and this would be noted on the paper.

Several months pass, the paper is reviewed and lightly revised, and the journal sends me a draft for final review. Nowhere at the top of the paper is my equal contribution noted. (Normally, this is done with asterisks by each name and a note at the bottom of the first page.) The top header does not have my name, and says only “theguy et al.” At the very bottom of the very last page after acknowledgments to the funding agencies, there is a note that GUY and PA shared equal contribution. (The draft we sent them had the asterisks and the note on the first page. This has been deleted entirely.) I mentioned this to my PI who sent them an email back asking that my contribution be at least noted at the top header, so that it would read Theguy and P.Anecdotal et al.

Today being so incredibly bored that I googled myself, I find that this paper has been posted online prior to its final hard copy publication later. Great! I bring it up, and these changes have not been made. The only note of my equal contribution is still that very difficult to find line at the very bottom of the last page.

With as much attention as proper author attribution has received lately, you would think that a journal would bend over backwards to make sure these things are correct. I know some journal policies now make you state exactly what every author contributed, and this is then printed. It just bugs me that they completely ignored our attempts to make note of my contribution.

So, what do I do? Should I just not worry about this? Should I mention it to my PI? Can the journal even do anything at this point?

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