The longest thread ever

ArkieDukie said:
Gonna be an interesting week. My department is interviewing a faculty candidate who does work that is very similar to mine. I found out about the interview from this person rather than from my boss. He called me in for a meeting; his spin was that they were recruiting someone and it would be a wonderful collaborative opportunity for me. Based on my conversations with said candidate, I don’t view it as a positive. Part of my conversation with this person was them telling me how well they treat the staff scientist who does similar work to me. I pointed out that I’m faculty, not a staff scientist. Then, when I told them about the paper we have out for review, they called it “incredible beginner’s luck.” For context, I found something in our data and encouraged my colleagues to follow up. Two years later, they did. As it turns out, I may have discovered something extremely important in onset of the disease my collaborator studies. But, hey, beginner’s luck.
I have a sneaking suspicion about what “collaboration” means to my boss, and it is nothing good for me. I have a theory based on a lot of snippets of conversations I’ve put together. I’ll soon find out if I’m right.
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I don't really "like" the post. But I understand it from my background in academic medicine. My expertise lies in teaching people about new research, rather than conducting it. But the vast majority of my close friends in medicine are the folks actually conducting the research. And it is a surprisingly cutthroat business. My hope is that this person is truly hopeful for collaboration, but I am not shocked at the condescension either. I see it and experience it all the time. But hopefully this turns out to be an opportunity for you.
 
ClemmonsDevil said:
I don't really "like" the post. But I understand it from my background in academic medicine. My expertise lies in teaching people about new research, rather than conducting it. But the vast majority of my close friends in medicine are the folks actually conducting the research. And it is a surprisingly cutthroat business. My hope is that this person is truly hopeful for collaboration, but I am not shocked at the condescension either. I see it and experience it all the time. But hopefully this turns out to be an opportunity for you.
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my brief stint in academia disabused me of the notion that people there act more openly and collaboratively than those in business. If anything, the opposite is true. snake pit.
 
budwom said:
my brief stint in academia disabused me of the notion that people there act more openly and collaboratively than those in business. If anything, the opposite is true. snake pit.
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Yeah. I’ve been in the game long enough to have worked with the same people multiple times but with different names. A current collaborator is like my boss at another former job in that he starts excluding me from meetings when I have a good idea so he can take credit. He wrote a paper after I left based on a project I outlined and put me in the acknowledgments for “helpful discussion.” That hasn’t happened here yet, which is a plus. The current collaborator is really good at saying “we” did something that is solely my work and using it to get new collaborators for himself. That is definitely the phenotype of my former boss. Evil person I am, I figure since he’s selling my skillset as his own, he needs to step up and do the work himself.

The potential colleague reminds me of someone from my last job. That person went so far as to rewrite author contributions on a manuscript to take credit for all my work. I was bumped to the middle of the author list and given credit for contributing tools for data analysis. The grad student who actually did all the work was afraid to do anything about it because that former colleague was crazy - and I do not say that lightly. Everyone involved in the project knows that the person taking credit for conceiving of and overseeing the entire project did not participate in a single meeting.

This reminds me of another classic from the old job. The department chair’s son redid data analysis from a collaboration of mine. I worked with the collaborator and a few other people to design the experiment, and one of those people did the work. However, in the revisionist history version of the story, the boss’s son designed and executed the experiment and performed all the analysis. His advisor allegedly oversaw all this work. The person who actually did all the work was credited with data curation, and I was given credit for performing initial analysis. I laughed this one off; it’s published in an obscure journal that no one reads.

So, yeah. Snake pit. Some places and people are worse than others.
 
ArkieDukie said:
So, yeah. Snake pit. Some places and people are worse than others.
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Sorry to hear of these experiences. When the abstract of my Masters thesis was published for a national meeting, I was lead author. And that was before I even had the degree. But that was also a long time ago.
 
My boss would occasionally loan out some of my time to researchers in other departments. That's the main way I wound up publishing with people I never met in person. One such study was is dire need of statistical analysis help because the team member who could actually do the statistics had left. I stepped in after the data had been collected but nothing else. I cleaned the data, ran the analysis, generated the tables, and wrote the statistical methods section. Someone higher up the chain - not the person who had asked my boss for help - refused to give me authorship on the paper. I didn't need the credit but the ethics of the situation bothered me. For those who are not familiar - it very much against the ethics of peer review to leave off someone who contributed as much to the paper as I did. I sent an email to my boss telling him that I was not going to make a stink about it but that I was officially letting him know I did not agree with the decision, mostly in a CYA capacity. I wanted someone to have a record that I was protesting the ethics.
 
Bostondevil said:
My boss would occasionally loan out some of my time to researchers in other departments. That's the main way I wound up publishing with people I never met in person. One such study was is dire need of statistical analysis help because the team member who could actually do the statistics had left. I stepped in after the data had been collected but nothing else. I cleaned the data, ran the analysis, generated the tables, and wrote the statistical methods section. Someone higher up the chain - not the person who had asked my boss for help - refused to give me authorship on the paper. I didn't need the credit but the ethics of the situation bothered me. For those who are not familiar - it very much against the ethics of peer review to leave off someone who contributed as much to the paper as I did. I sent an email to my boss telling him that I was not going to make a stink about it but that I was officially letting him know I did not agree with the decision, mostly in a CYA capacity. I wanted someone to have a record that I was protesting the ethics.
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That is definitely unethical. I’d never do that myself, but when I worked here before, it happened to me. A collaborator used figures I generated and put me in the acknowledgments rather than the author list. Ironically, to avoid putting me on the paper, they wrote the section relating to my work. Needless to say, it was completely wrong. I considered it karmic justice.
 
YmoBeThere said:
If your turkey isn’t defrosting right now, you have to ask yourself, am I too late?

The obvious answer is no, you are not. But you may want to consider your life choices.
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From experience, a water bath with frequent changes works wonders if you are up a hill.
 
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