This can hapen quite easily. Since retiring I remain active on a consulting basis, and in one case the PI for whom I was working disagreed with my conclusions and changed them to suit her views. She pointed out that I was hired to do the work and her institute owned my results. I asked to have my name off the paper, but it appeared anyway, to my great embarassment. The great irony of this is that the paper was just one part of a large three-year EU project, and in the final review the only criticism of the project was that in this one paper the conclusions did not follow from the data!
Aside from the problems of ownership of work done by consultants, I have other issues with the statement that every author "should be certain that he or she understands everything in the paper completely, and fully agrees. " As research becomes more complex it is harder to meet this criterion. Suppose that you carry out an ecological project where a microbiologist does some extensive work on the detrital part of the food web. She merits co-authorship for her work, but that does not mean that she fully understands the foraging theory or trophic structure of the rest of the paper. Co-authors should be responsible for what they do, but not for what everyone else does. I'm a marine ecologist, and the sampling on a cruise is carried out by people with very different backgrounds. The fisheries people don't know much about plankton and vice versa. This should not rule out the possibility of their all contributing to a paper summarising the cruise. Bill Silvert ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Mosca III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2007 1:31 PM Subject: Re: writing a paper and authorship > The friend who was asked to write the paper should be certain that he or > she understands everything in the paper completely, and fully agrees. > Otherwise there is the danger of taking a flawed position and having it > hurt his or her career. I was in this position once, and when I realized > that I did not agree with the PI in the research, I had the difficult and > embarrassing chore of asking that my name be removed from the paper.
