Paid for work, later found in PhD uncited

[nrobles8]

I have a question about a very interesting situation. A friend of mine was working as a student worker and was offered additional pay by a student that was supervising him to create figures/maps for what, at the time, appeared to be simply for work purposes. My friend now recently discovered the work he did was in that student's PhD with only a general acknowledgement of my friend, not of his specific work. His methods do not mention that the figures were created by my friend and the figures do not cite him either. Is this a form of plagiarism?

Edited April 9, 2015 by nrobles8

[jujubea]

Sorry I got nothin...

 

Hmmmm... the person was paid to do the work though...

 

I'm curious how these things are; interested to see answers..

[GeoDUDE!]

I think its bad taste but not plagiarism.

 

Did your friend collect the data for the figures? Did your friend come up with the idea for the figures, or was he simply being used as a "monkey"? 

 

Sometimes writers speak to people who type up their novels for them. I'm not sure how they are cited, but I assume its similar. 

[victorydance]

This is normal for a RA. I worked for a prof and one of the tables I did ended up being a part of his published paper. How does this in any form mean plagiarism?

Edited April 9, 2015 by victorydance

[fuzzylogician]

If he created figures based on instructions from the PhD student, based on data collected by the student, and he was paid for the job, then I don't think he has anything to complain about. It may have been better etiquette to give your friend credit more specifically for the figures he created, but at the end of the day it sounds like his only contribution was entirely technical and it was paid for. That's not plagiarism, if you ask me.

[nrobles8]

Ok, cool. Thanks everyone! Was really interested to hear some opinions and experiences about this. 

[MathCat]

I would ask this on the academia stack exchange if you want a broader view point. I agree with the above that it is probably just a bit tacky, and not plagiarism.

[dr. t]

As a point of reference, I often create maps for a full professor, and I am paid for the task. My name is still on all those maps, a point on which the professor himself insisted.

[Sigaba]

I have a question about a very interesting situation. A friend of mine was working as a student worker and was offered additional pay by a student that was supervising him to create figures/maps for what, at the time, appeared to be simply for work purposes. My friend now recently discovered the work he did was in that student's PhD with only a general acknowledgement of my friend, not of his specific work. His methods do not mention that the figures were created by my friend and the figures do not cite him either. Is this a form of plagiarism?

 

What does the contract/agreement/scope of services between your friend and your friend's boss say about ownership of the work product?

[TakeruK]

I agree with Sigaba--the first step is to find out what (if any) agreement exists on the ownership of the product your friend created. 

 

As for the "citing" issue, if these maps were not published elsewhere, then it's not really possible to "cite" them. If you just mean whether or not the thesis should have explicitly mentioned your friend by name, then this is really dependent on the rules of the publication. For example, some journals in my field require authors to explicitly state what they contributed while others will only acknowledge names without details. For a PhD thesis, the rules are usually pretty lax and it would only be a problem if the school required a different form of acknowledgement.

 

Without an agreement between your friend and the author of the PhD thesis, and without any regulations from your school stating otherwise, there is nothing legally wrong with what happened. As for ethics--I'm not sure, this might depend on the norms in your field. In mine, we usually do not acknowledge every piece of work explicitly, just by name at the end (although if I published peer-reviewed article using maps made by a colleague that I paid, I would likely include them in the author list; but this is not possible if the maps are only published in a thesis). With the information presented here and considering the norms of my field, if this happened to a friend, I would not consider it plagiarism or a breach of ethics. (Although it would have been nice for the thesis author to talk to your friend so that everyone was on the same page with regards to how the maps would be credited).