Friday, 8 January 2016

etiquette - Advisor threatening to pull his name from accepted paper that I submitted without his knowledge


Recently, I submitted a research article in the journal "Applied Mathematics and Computations" and fortunately my work got accepted with a very good response from reviewers.


However, I made the mistake of submitting this paper without the knowledge of my coauthor (who is my advisor). When I told him that our paper had been accepted, he became really upset with me and warned me that he would withdraw his name from the article.


Nothing is wrong with the article except that I did not ask him before submitting it. The reason I did not ask him was because he took an unnecessarily long time (2-3 months) to edit the draft of the manuscript.


How should I convince him now?


PS. Please also see this "Query".



Answer



You are wrong for putting the name of someone on a paper and submitting it without asking them for permission. Having them as an author communicates to the world that they approved the content and agree with the conclusions. Implicit in that is that they signed off on the manuscript. Some people get angry when this happens even if the paper is fine and they agree with the conclusions. Some don't. This happened to me recently, and even though I didn't agree with the recommendations of the paper, they weren't wrong, scientifically, so I decided to let it go.


You need to figure out a way to smooth this over with your advisor and to work with them to get edits turned around more quickly. That being said, don't lead the discussion by bringing up the turnaround time issue. That's combative.


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