3 ms·

> There's no shame in it: academics have grad students, who at least sometimes get a mention in the acknowledgements. In what field????? In fields I'm familiar

> There's no shame in it: academics have grad students, who at least sometimes get a mention in the acknowledgements. In what field????? In fields I'm familiar, whoever does the research (i.e. the grad student or the postdoc) is the first author, helpers are co-authors and the PI i.e. the main academic who leads the lab is the last author. In what field PI is the first author and grad students "sometimes get acknowledgement"? That sounds like academic fraud.

tiffanyg 3y ago
It used to happen much more in the past. Many decades ago, AFAIK, at least in the journals / fields / areas I'm familiar with. I'm not sure where that might happen or be tolerated, today. If you go back and look at research into antibiotics, DNA, etc. back in the 1940s and 1950s ... and even research in the 1960s and 1970s, decades later, there ended up being serious questions around ethics, authorship, etc. for some really seminal papers, for example.
gus_massa 3y ago
I agree. Grad students must appear in the paper because most universities have an explicit or implicit requirement of a few papers to get the Ph.D.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jhbadger 3y ago
It's very field dependent. The first author=person who did most of the work and last author=advisor is pretty much just how biomedical science works. Other fields have different traditions. I'm a computational biologist who has worked in both biology and computer science, and in CS (at least in the 1990s-early 2000s) the tradition was simple alphabetical order, for example, with no privilege afforded to either the first or last place. Along with other quirks like how presenting a result at a conference was considered equal to publishing it as opposed to in biology where conferences are more social networking events.
- two_handfuls 3y ago
  In my experience for computer science (systems field) it’s usually the same, first author=most work and last author=advisor.
- jasonhong 3y ago
  In theoretical CS, the convention is still alphabetic order. In most other CS, advisor tends to be last.

tiffanyg 3y ago

It used to happen much more in the past. Many decades ago, AFAIK, at least in the journals / fields / areas I'm familiar with. I'm not sure where that might happen or be tolerated, today. If you go back and look at research into antibiotics, DNA, etc. back in the 1940s and 1950s ... and even research in the 1960s and 1970s, decades later, there ended up being serious questions around ethics, authorship, etc. for some really seminal papers, for example.

gus_massa 3y ago

I agree. Grad students must appear in the paper because most universities have an explicit or implicit requirement of a few papers to get the Ph.D.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jhbadger 3y ago

It's very field dependent. The first author=person who did most of the work and last author=advisor is pretty much just how biomedical science works. Other fields have different traditions. I'm a computational biologist who has worked in both biology and computer science, and in CS (at least in the 1990s-early 2000s) the tradition was simple alphabetical order, for example, with no privilege afforded to either the first or last place. Along with other quirks like how presenting a result at a conference was considered equal to publishing it as opposed to in biology where conferences are more social networking events.

two_handfuls 3y ago
In my experience for computer science (systems field) it’s usually the same, first author=most work and last author=advisor.
jasonhong 3y ago
In theoretical CS, the convention is still alphabetic order. In most other CS, advisor tends to be last.