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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

In the US I saw engineering labs using PhDs from abroad as almost slave labor. A bit hyperbolic perhaps, but the students were not allowed to progress without the advisor's say so, and the advisors would not allow them to top-author papers they were basically sole contributing. On top of that, between their own work and lab work, they were expected to put in 60 to 80 hours a week.

The point is, the power dynamics were out of whack.

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>advisors would not allow them to top-author papers they were basically sole contributing

As an aside, how is this possible, or legal? Can't a student (can't anyone) submit a paper to a journal on their own? IIRC Einstein was a free-agent when he submitted all those papers in 1905.

Modern science isn't a one-person affair. Few papers have single authorships nowadays because science is done in teams rather than by lone geniuses (and even in the case of Einstein it looks like his first wife, the mathematician Mileva Marić, should probably have been given co-authorships on some of those early papers). While some fields simply have authors listed in alphabetical order, many have special meaning to the first and last authors -- the first author is given to the person who supposedly contributed the most (which can be contentious; typically a grad student or post-doc) and the last author is given to the mentor of the first author.

It's been several years since I spoke to my friends who went through this, but from what I recall:

- Thread of retribution

- Claims of IP ownership, similar to how corporations in the US make claim to things developed on their time and their machinery

If you can churn out 1 paper every 3 months doing 8-5 that’s fine. The truth is that the incentive model is based on papers you published (to be subsequently used in NSF proposals). Hence, for most people that means working their ass off to churn out papers at a decent rate. I guess you could say something else is broken — like the way conferences have super low acceptance rates?

This hits close to home.

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