Saturday 30 January 2016

publications - Should a PhD student be credited in supervisor’s article that is based on a book chapter by both?



Jane is doing a PhD and is supervised by Professor Mary. Mary asked Jane to put together a review article for a book based on a draft chapter from Jane’s thesis with additional suggestions from Mary. The book article was submitted with the authors listed as Jane and Mary (corresponding author). I am unsure whether this has actually been published, though it was submitted well before the now-published review by Mary.


Sometime later, Mary submitted a broader review article online which used large chunks of text and figures from the book article which were directly written/generated by Jane. Whole paragraphs were copied verbatim from the first article to Mary’s article, and many more paragraphs were slightly rewritten but contained exactly the same references and phrases from the first article. Mary’s paper did not cite the book review. Mary was listed as the sole author. Jane was not informed this review was being written, and was not asked for permission to include her figures or content from the book article, which were originally written by her for her thesis.




  1. Did Jane ‘hand over’ the rights to her written material to Mary by agreeing to submit the book article under both of their names?




  2. Should Mary have credited Jane in the article as a second author because she used exact sentences from the book article which were written by Jane?





  3. Will Jane still be able to use these (her) phrases and figures in her thesis despite not being credited on Mary’s online article?






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