Screwed over in research

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So I have been working at a lab for almost a year now. A couple of other students and I, one starting when I did, and another much later, have been working on a project for my PI. I find out that I am not on the draft for the paper, and the other two students are. I just don't know how to feel, we always used to split up work, worked as a team. It just gets to you, you kinda lose motivation.

When an opportunity for recognition slips by leaving you in the dust, you feel like you were not worth being recognized. I don't know. I got shafted. Has this happened to anyone else? Also, how do I prevent this on future projects? I don't feel like making any awkwardness between me and my PI, he's my physio teacher until Dec 18th. 🙂

Can we get an update OP? Did you talk to your PI?
 
UPDATE:

I talked to my PI and he said he felt I didn't contribute as much as the others. I guess its a matter of feelings then.

I do not think I will appeal, an option he gave me. IDK, maybe I'll just have to let go.
 
UPDATE:

I talked to my PI and he said he felt I didn't contribute as much as the others. I guess its a matter of feelings then.

I do not think I will appeal, an option he gave me. IDK, maybe I'll just have to let go.

Just ask him how you can contribute more, if you can start to work on your own project, etc. Trust me, I know how much it can suck to not get an authorship. I put in 70-80 hours per week for 3.5 months this summer helping someone finish his project. Granted, my work was largely data collection / processing / interpretation, but still, I did not receive authorship or acknowledgment on the paper. In hindsight I realize that I probably didn't deserve it, as the "intellectual contribution to the project" criteria wasn't so much met. BUT the project did make me an expert at doing a bunch of different biochemistry / immunology techniques, so much so that other people in the lab now come to me when they need something done because they know I've mastered it. You just have to build up some rapport with other lab members, get familiar with all the protocols and yeah, make some sacrifices.

Also keep in mind that publications are nice but aren't essential, even for admission at MD/PhD programs. You just have to demonstrate that you have a strong grasp of a project and were able to make a substantial contribution to it. Often this is manifested through paper authorship, presentation at conferences, or posters, but in some cases things just don't work out (like your case) and I think adcoms can be sympathetic to this.
 
Have you guys even ever read the criteria for authorship in a journal? Its not meant to just be whoever baked the PI the best cupcakes this week. For example, here is the authorship criteria from JAMA:

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Authorship Criteria and Contributions and Authorship Form. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article. Authorship credit should be based only on (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; and (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met.3,4
http://jama.ama-assn.org/misc/ifora.dtl#AuthorshipCriteriaandContributionsandAuthorshipForm

Most journals have similar criteria. Just because you collected data in a lab DOES NOT mean that you deserve authorship.

The key word is "deserve." Whether or not you get included in a paper largely depends on the expectations of the PI and the size of the project. Some PIs will expect you to be very involved in a project to the point where you almost designing the experiments itself. In these cases, you may get an acknowledgement of data collection if that is all you did, but not authorship. For larger projects where multiple labs are involved, you are usually less likely to get authorship since the major PIs or grad student contributors will get those spots. On the other hand, majority of PIs simply want you to be performing data collection, interpreting the results enough to have know whether they were good or not, and have an idea of where to go next. If the student has sufficient knowledge to interpret the results in some capacity, they usually will get included in authorship. This is more likely if you are reporting directly to the PI and fewer people are involved.

My PI has openly expressed that I can get a publication by meeting the latter criteria. Only problem has been that we keep putting a project on hold after the first few stages and then I get shuffled to a different project. Hopefully the new one I am starting next week will be something I work on until graduation and get a publication along the way.
 
I am sorry for dragging this on so long.

For those of you that followed my rant, so as you know I emailed my PI etc.

Well anyways, I emailed him about lab schedules, (simple) and he responds saying he is doubtful if I should come to lab this term. WTF?

What should I do? Just leave?
 
I am sorry for dragging this on so long.

For those of you that followed my rant, so as you know I emailed my PI etc.

Well anyways, I emailed him about lab schedules, (simple) and he responds saying he is doubtful if I should come to lab this term. WTF?

What should I do? Just leave?

If you legitimately feel that you should have been included on the publication + this recent bit about not wanting you to come to lab, then I'd say yeah, find somebody else...make your expectations clear up front (willing to work hard but would like to be included on manuscript...ask what you have to do to make that happen). Sorry ... that sounds like a really sucky situation. It's 99% just a bad personality though...some people are just jerks.
 
I am sorry for dragging this on so long.

For those of you that followed my rant, so as you know I emailed my PI etc.

Well anyways, I emailed him about lab schedules, (simple) and he responds saying he is doubtful if I should come to lab this term. WTF?

What should I do? Just leave?

It is time to move on to find another PI. Obviously your PI is not a good boss to work for and he/she doesn't appreciate what you do. If you participated in the research you should get some recognition.
 
Just ask him how you can contribute more, if you can start to work on your own project, etc. Trust me, I know how much it can suck to not get an authorship. I put in 70-80 hours per week for 3.5 months this summer helping someone finish his project. Granted, my work was largely data collection / processing / interpretation, but still, I did not receive authorship or acknowledgment on the paper. In hindsight I realize that I probably didn't deserve it, as the "intellectual contribution to the project" criteria wasn't so much met. BUT the project did make me an expert at doing a bunch of different biochemistry / immunology techniques, so much so that other people in the lab now come to me when they need something done because they know I've mastered it. You just have to build up some rapport with other lab members, get familiar with all the protocols and yeah, make some sacrifices.

Also keep in mind that publications are nice but aren't essential, even for admission at MD/PhD programs. You just have to demonstrate that you have a strong grasp of a project and were able to make a substantial contribution to it. Often this is manifested through paper authorship, presentation at conferences, or posters, but in some cases things just don't work out (like your case) and I think adcoms can be sympathetic to this.

You should get an acknowledgement for those 1000+ hours if all you did was wipe the sweat from the PI's genitals.
 
As a grad student in an academic lab and having sat in on research ethics courses, etc, I have a few comments:

First, DendWrite probably deserved coauthorship based on the extent of his contributions to the project. If you put in that many hours and played an integral role in finishing part of the project, then you should be included in the list of authors. Of course, this depends on the specific journal, but this would pass the bar on almost any journal criteria I've seen.

On the other hand, the Op sounds like he probably didn't deserve any sort of authorship. (At the same time, the other undergrads in his lab probably didn't either.) Simple data collection with no intellectual input into the experimental design is not worthy of authorship. If you can't explain the theory behind what you're doing, and didn't have any input into how the data was processed or how the experiments were designed, then your contribution belongs in the acknowledgments section. Data collection can be deserving of authorship, but it needs to be pretty extensive. More often, data analysis is worthy of authorship because it involves some important decisions.

Think about it this way: if what your role in a project could be replaced by a sophisticated robot, then your contributions are worthy of authorship.
 
I am sorry for dragging this on so long.

For those of you that followed my rant, so as you know I emailed my PI etc.

Well anyways, I emailed him about lab schedules, (simple) and he responds saying he is doubtful if I should come to lab this term. WTF?

What should I do? Just leave?

He doesn't want you to return because you asked for some type of credit, or he just doesn't want you back now?

Maybe there was some incident you didn't realize, or maybe someone gave the PI false information about something you did? I don't know. I'm actually very curious as to why this happened now.
 
i will tell you right now that PI's do form an impression of you early on that will not change without doing a lot of hardwork contrary to that. This doesn't mean taking up a lot of slack in the background but actually going up to your PI and engaging them on a regular basis, so they know what you are up to.

My PI thought VERY HIGHLY of me even when i felt that I didn't really do that much. I always felt I never lived up to many of the others. This isn't purely just humbleness. I mean I put in the hours I just was really bad at lab. Nevertheless, the other senior undergrads always put in a good word about me and the lab manager and me got along as well. When time came around to ask for LOR's, I got mine done way in advance of others despite the fact that near the end I had stopped coming regularly do the grunt work (which everyone should really contribute to) and was focused on my own project (which in the end didn't pan out and I never got results for).

This other guy though b/c of schedule conflicts couldn't put in more than 6 hours a week. However, he showed up regularly and did his part which is a credit to him and better than some of the other undergrads I knew. Overall, I thought he was a nice guy and thought he was smart and bright. He tried sucking up to make up a little for the time he put in and even put in a lot more hours near the end but my supervisor still treated him poorly. In fact, despite being there for over a year, my supervisor hinted that he didn't want to write one for him period.
 
I have a meeting with him on Friday, I'll just have to see how it goes.
 
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