should i argue for authorship?

[spectastic]

I helped make some material for a more senior grad student that's getting submitted, and when I say helped, I really mean I made the material, while the other grad student characterized, and shipped it away to our first author collaborators. The way I see it, I played equal contributing role to this project as the more senior grad student, except I wasn't even really a part of the conversation as far as authorship goes and the other person is getting 2nd authorship. Objectively speaking, our group only made the material because we have the resources to make it, and not many places do. So the level of contribution on our side wasn't actually that great. In that respect, 2nd authorship is highly glorified, because we don't actually have a good idea what our collaborators did. I think it's a low impact journal anyway. So what would you do?

[fuzzylogician]

Sounds like the kind of place where there might be lots of politics and inter-personal intrigue. I would suggest approaching your PI with this question, and taking his lead. 

(If it were me, I would probably try to figure out if this is the kind of thing that usually merits authorship, and if so, I'd bring it up and not be ashamed to ask. But then, it's not like a middle authorship is all that important to one's career, so I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it. I would want to make sure this is not a repeat issue, though, where I spend time doing work for someone else, without reciprocity, and without any benefit for myself.)

[spectastic]

thanks for the advice. I'll ask adviser about it. I'm planning to apply for federal fellowships next year. that's the main reason this concerns me. I realize this won't really contribute to my graduation in any significant degree

[TakeruK]

Find out what's the norm in your field too. The contribution you described may merit authorship in some fields but not in others.

I have been in the same position as you before, in my field. The equivalent would be me taking telescope data, but then having the senior student analyze the data and report the results to the first authors of the paper. The norm in my field is that most people err on the side of inclusion for authorship, i.e. the first author would invite both me and the senior student to be authors. My personal philosophy is to always decline authorship if the only thing I did was obtain the data / create the material. I do accept authorship whenever I am active in the analysis/characterization of the data though. 

The reason is like fuzzy said, middle author papers aren't very helpful to me. Also, I don't feel comfortable being an author if I do not know what happened to the data I took. Instead, I just ask for an acknowledgement and politely decline authorship. 

I try to avoid doing work that don't result in authorship though. The above scenario only happened 2 or 3 times, in the earlier part of my grad school career. I agreed to do the work because it was a good way to 1) gain favours from other people and 2) practice/demonstrate my abilities. After a couple of times, it no longer benefited me so I stopped doing the gather-data-only step.

But this doesn't mean I stopped helping people! Whenever people ask for a favour, I agree and volunteer to collect the data and analyze it, so that I would be a coauthor (and an "earned" coauthorship, in my opinion). Doing this also gets me a lot more exposure to collaborators at other institutions, something that becomes very helpful when you apply for talks at conferences (these people will be on the committees) and applying for jobs. 

In your situation, I second fuzzylogician's advice to basically "pick your battles". Talk to your advisor first and your advisor should be the one advocating on your behalf if it's the norm to grant authorship for your contribution (it would be easy for your advisor to also tell the first author: thanks for including my student X on the paper but you should also include spectastic as they created the material!) etc. If it's not the norm to be a coauthor for this work, tell your advisor that you learned a lot from your experience making this material but you would also like to learn how to do the senior grad student's analysis/characterization as well, so that you can be involved in these collaborations. Maybe the advisor will have the other student teach you (I've also been in the senior grad student's position and am always happy to train junior students). 

[spectastic]

boss said we'll talk about it on monday, and do the right thing. he suspects that the first authors didn't know I existed, which was probably true, because I let the other grad student be the liaison between our groups.

Edited March 11, 2017 by spectastic