Comment by throwaway2294af | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2294af | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway2294af

I successfully kicked out a professor from academia who was a bully and was harassing many other people. But this costed me several years of my career and was extremely tough to do. Ironically, I eventually ended up in a worse place. Some things I have learned in the process:

* Bullying is much more common in experimental fields. From what I've seen, bullies are enriched in the population of >50 years old professor (male or female) who attracts tons of funding and publishes several articles per month. Publishing so often is, in general, a red flag.

* When joining a group, try to talk to graduate students and postdocs. People stopped joining our group because they knew it was led by a bully. In general, most students will be extremely honest about bad working conditions.

* Before joining, try to test drive the group in some way. For example, with a small rotation project. Usually, being an insider even during a short period will reveal all nasty stuff. We had many rotation project students and none of them stayed.

* A good heuristic is to join small groups where the leader, young or old, has skin in the game. Usually, younger PIs in small groups have more skin in the game and they tend to be nicer.

* Another good heuristic is to join groups where people regularly progress to other positions in academia.

> I'm interested if people have any horror stories of their own to share about abusive PIs

Things I have experienced first hand, either myself or graduate students:

* A male PI that hires attractive graduate students and gives them easy tasks to land Nature, Science or Cell co-authorships and at the same time tries to land sexual favors from them.

* A female PI that only hires female graduate students and is incredibly aggressive towards male students from other groups, trying to undermine their research.

* A junior faculty member who progressively asked some students to do more and more unreasonable tasks in a particular project so that they eventually refused. Got them removed them from the project clearly in order to get a better position for himself in the publication and to include some of his friends. All this close to submission.

* A group of junior faculty members who plotted to change first authors days before submission, without communicating with the downgraded authors. Needless to say, they upgraded themselves to first authors, without having contributed anything.

* Written threats to misrepresent research results.

When I was a PhD student, my papers almost always had author order alphabetical. I later learned that other fields cared about "first author". At first, I couldn't believe it - it's so obviously ripe for abuse. But I found out it's true - and abused.

I'm in a more senor position now and I still prefer alphabetic order. Having more power than coauthors has somewhat softened my stance though, as my preferences shouldn't be forced upon underlings.

But it is still baffling that anyone (let alone scientists) puts any stock in author order.

Your name doesn't start with "A" or "B", by chance? ;-)

You say it in jest, but I know a group whose head's surname started with a B and she was a staunch defender of alphabetical order... until someone joined who started with an A.

It doesn't, no.

I'm currently supervising 2 PhD students whose last name is alphabetically later than mine. I explained my reasons for my preference to them; that's how far I'll go. With one, we've had multiple collaborations outside the institution. In those cases, alphabetical order was typically arrived upon with all authors. In other cases it depends - we've had quite equal contribution papers which ended up alphabetically. We're now working on one that he conceived and executed. I'm basically the co-writing sparring partner, where I strongly prefer him to be first author.

The other student feels it's important for his career to be first author, so he is. I certainly hope he's wrong (for my career so far it didn't matter), but I'm not taking that chance.

I'm 2nd author on a 2-author paper where my only contribution was answering a couple of questions on how to use some software, and then proofreading the couple of paragraphs that mentioned it. I didn't even read most of the paper, let alone know what it was really about. Surely there's a need to communicate the fact that my contribution is less than that of the real author?

I agree, but order isn't the way to do that, as it could mean you did 49% or 4%. A better system would be to just explain what each author did.

In the last few years, an increasing number of journals are adopting that kind of system.

No doubt. Or not even have such minor contributors as authors in the first place. Perhaps you should have to have actually written part of the paper, like an actual author, or at least done some novel research of your own. Technicians and others who assisted with it, even did all of the grunt work could just be acknowledged if they want some fame. But I guess that authorship is a kind of payment-by-exposure instead of actual money and enough people are desperate enough to take it.

Could you elaborate on your gripe with order, or how that would be abused?

In my field, 1st author did most of the work, typically the responsible grad student, then authors 2 to n-1 supporting characters, maybe contributed some data, some script, wrote a paragraph. Last author is PI.

Sometimes you’ll have a 2nd author who ended up contributing like the 1st as the paper progresses, that’s really the only ambiguous situation, but you can switch that around for a conference or follow-up.

Looked like the second one worked under the first one after graduation.

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