Hello,

I am currently writing up my thesis. Before I finished up in the lab,I asked my supervisor about when should I start writing up my research paper to be published. She informed me to wait until I had submitted my thesis. A post doc who started a year ago in the lab has taken over my work and brought it to the next stage. I received an email from him today where he had wrote up the paper and used my data AND has put his name as the first author.

The paper contains 70% of my data and 30% of his. I am upset as I emailed him last year saying I would like to write the paper. He never responded.

I am wondering am I allowed to be first author on the paper. I know I have not wrote it but the paper does contain most of my work and I have worked on the research for the past three years where as the post doc has only worked on the research for a year. I don't feel comfortable talking to my supervisor as I feel that her opinion will be that the postdoc had more experience writing papers and has probably done a better job than if I had been given the chance to write my first paper. Furthermore, the reason why I am so anxious to become first author is because I do not want to stay in academia and need publications in order for the job I would like post viva.

Thank you in advance:-)

Hi Julie. This is a really unfortunate situation. There seems to be a lot of tension surrounding first authorship on papers- understandably, given the benefits of having first-author papers. Unfortunately, data collection alone does not necessarily entitle one to being first author- in fact it is quite possible to have collected all of the data and not being an author at all if that is the only input one has had. I have known people who have collected the entire set of data (but not been involved in the write-up or analysis) to just be mentioned in passing in the acknowledgement section of the paper. So I suppose the question for you is how much you contributed to the paper aside from the data. Was the idea for the research yours? Did you get involved in the analysis of results and the conclusions drawn from them? When you say the post-doc has taken your work 'to the next stage', how do you mean? It is crappy that you weren't given the chance to write this paper yourself- especially given that they knew you wanted to write it and then wrote it behind your back. Unfortunately I have seen this done before once in my own department- sounds like a very similar situation to yours. I think this time you are going to struggle to convince the post-doc to put you as first author given that he/she has already written the paper, unless you can prove that a significant amount of the academic content was your own (the thinking behind the research, analysis, main conclusions drawn, new theory derived from results etc). If you still feel that you have been hard done by then it might be worth asking your supervisor very tactfully about what would normally constitute enough of a contribution for first authorship, but I think you would have to be pretty non-confrontational about it at this stage. I suppose the next best thing to do would be to speak to your supervisor about any other papers that you might be able to write up for publication, and explain that you are really keen to do this. It is not a nice situation and I really feel for you- however these things can be a bit sensitive so I would tread carefully. Best wishes, KB