4 ms·

> I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count

> I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count cells in a microfluidic device using image processing. I sat down with them for a couple of hours and walked them through a few methods they could look into to get started collecting all the examples in a script. Basic stuff so they wouldn't feel overwhelmed. A few months later I see he published my simple introduction as a paper with zero modifications. He had the good grace to at least thank me in the acknowledgments. That can't be the whole story, surely? You verbally suggested a couple of possibilities for what might work and wrote down a couple of lines of code, and then I imagine the student tried out all of those possibilities and reported what did and didn't work? I mean, what academic journal would want to publish half-working examples with unstudied properties? Mind you, I agree about your broader point that (especially in academia) a lot of people don't really understand and respect code authorship.

erosenbe0 5y ago
IMO, academia is not better or worse -- often they do apply their citation culture to code. The overall problem is that people tend to think only in terms of first order consequences. A little copying here and there might have minimal financial or reputational risk. But the second order consequences of that becoming the example and the norm for the junior ranks and the next generation causes larger organizational risk. So got to consider the bigger picture and nip the ethical lapses immediately.
knolan 5y ago
I’ve checked the paper again and there is also some basic CFD analysis performed by a third author. He had some sample images he had taken and I used them to demonstrate the basic code. The figures in the paper are the ones I generated in my sample code.

erosenbe0 5y ago

IMO, academia is not better or worse -- often they do apply their citation culture to code. The overall problem is that people tend to think only in terms of first order consequences. A little copying here and there might have minimal financial or reputational risk. But the second order consequences of that becoming the example and the norm for the junior ranks and the next generation causes larger organizational risk. So got to consider the bigger picture and nip the ethical lapses immediately.

knolan 5y ago

I’ve checked the paper again and there is also some basic CFD analysis performed by a third author. He had some sample images he had taken and I used them to demonstrate the basic code. The figures in the paper are the ones I generated in my sample code.