Two Down, Two To Go?

In six hours, with 21 emails sent between 4 people in 2 countries/time-zones, and one last half-hour trying to figure out how to edit a TIFF on a Mac (eventually accomplished in 30 seconds in Paint, one last reason to love Windows), and the usual obsessing over journal formatting requirements, my second manuscript has been submitted.

Representing Experiment 2 of my dissertation, and one of those findings that convinced my advisor/committee that the research was worthwhile, it has been sent to a major journal (impact factor > 4) due to my advisor's philosophy of "aim high". Not quite as high as a lab-mate, who is submitting to Science, but high enough that I have no expectations.

The submission comes with perfect timing: Yesterday I finished collecting data for Experiment 3, and with the submission of Experiment 2 I can turn to all-new data analysis. Of course, I have just 2 weeks or less before learning whether the journal will even review our manuscript (they decline to review 60% of submissions), so I might not have much time to devote to the new data before the manuscript is back in my lap in need of a new journal and any relevant revisions. Still, it's reason enough to go out for dinner on a Friday night, even if I will be going on vacation on Monday.

Reprint Requests

This morning I found not one but two emails requesting reprints of my in-press article. This was at once incredibly exciting - I don't care if it's only two people, someone outside my lab is going to read about my research! - and incredibly surprising. How the heck did these complete strangers even find out about the paper?

It turns out that the corrected proof is now available online, and no-one told me. Again, this is incredibly exciting, and I will have to refrain from constantly prodding Google Scholar to see when I'm searchable research (with a specific title and author name; I'm not too ambitious here).

Now it's time to perfect the generic "thanks for your interest, here's a copy" email. I am new enough at this to be obsessed over every word and punctuation mark.

Proofs!

The proofs are here! Buried among the 23 emails waiting in my inbox after a weekend away (most of them written by my collaborators on a new project, on Saturday morning of all times) was the expected email from Elsevier with a copy proofs of my very first journal article!

My dad wasn't sure that electronic copies of the published article would have the impact of a print, of the journal itself. I wasn't sure myself. Speaking functionally, of course, the electronic copies are much preferred; I rarely stray from laptop reading these days. Speaking emotionally, from the ridiculously juvenile glee of seeing my name in print, the electronic copies have plenty of impact. There's the header reading "article in press" in big capital letters, and a small image of the journal cover above the title, and my name with the fancy footnote of university affiliation....

The most important thing is that it looks very much like a real article and not just yet another paper I've written. However much time the copy-editors had to spend on the formatting makes all the difference.

I Am So Cool

Or at least my research is. In the eyes of one of the other graduate students in my lab. When that research involves an unexpected result with task he himself has been using heavily. But my presentations have rarely, if ever, inspired others to write emails talking about how awesome my research is and how I should try to publish it right away. I'll take what I can get.

My advisor has similar opinions. One brief report accepted, and now she wants to start on another - and neither have anything to do with my dissertation. When will that get done?

Rise of the Machines

I have been stunned by the department copier. Not because of stapling and collating, which is simply how copiers have "always" functioned. Because the administrative assistant typed my email address into the copier, pushed a button, and by the time I was back at my desk across the hall, I had the .pdf of my form waiting in my inbox. The .pdf doesn't make the "foom" sound (and I missed the new-email "ding"), or look as impressive, but I found myself completely amazed nonetheless.

All this stands in complete counterpoint to my much-less-thrilled amazement that the journal publishing company, based in the Netherlands, of all places, requires a full-page document of refusal to pay $700 to have a figure published in color - a document that could not be modified on the computer, and had to be printed out. Perhaps they were aware that my department copier must be able to make new .pdfs in under 10 seconds. They couldn't really have wanted me to pay to snail-mail or fax something from midwest USA to the Netherlands.

Let the Headache Begin

Of course, there had to be a downside to getting a paper accepted for publication. The headache of pre-publication paperwork turns out to be it.

There has been no training on how to handle the technicalities of being first author. Up until today, this has consisted entirely of keeping on top of who's turn it is to edit the manuscript, submitting the final documents, and forwarding emails; none of this is something I needed a great deal of training for. Now, however, the paperwork is rolling in.

Okay, it was only one email. But what an email! Do you want to pay $700 for your figure to be printed in color? Heck no, you have to be kidding me. Do you want a "marked PDF", or 25 free offprints? I don't know - I'll be able to get a regular PDF copy as soon as it's available online, so I can't see the point of a "marked" one, but (aside from my Dad's desire to hand out copies of my paper like Halloween candy), I'm not sure that there's a point to paper offprints either. (How cheap are these journals that they think throwing together a PDF negates the traditional cost of 25 copies of the article?)

I've been having a relaxed, stress-free, relatively productive week. There is no logical reason for this email to ruin my day. I think the problem is that it's just the start. The road to publication will continue as a long, drawn-out process with occasional tasks coming at unpredictable times. I hate getting emails I can't just deal with immediately and delete.

Accepted

Apparently "accepted pending minor revisions" really is meaningful. The first two rounds of submissions to this journal took just over three months each, first coming back "revise and resubmit" and then coming back "minor revisions". The final round lasted less than 24 hours, with the final, official acceptance hitting my inbox a full hour before my advisor's one-word email ("Great!") acknowledging that the final submission had been made.

So there we are. I have no idea what the backlog on brief reports is at this journal, but at some point in the coming year I will be a published author. It wasn't my idea or my design, but it was all my analysis and a great deal my writing. Even I can't be pessimistic at this stage. Now I can eagerly start anticipating the hectic proofs process, and hoping that in with the author reprints is at least one copy of the entire journal, with my name buried in the Contents list.

How Low-Priority Can Ethics Be?

My advisor has been sitting on revisions to a brief report for over four months now. Last February, we discovered a mistake in calculations in a published paper, that crossed the level of significance. Results that had been acceptably significant could now only be called "marginally" significant. We found the error in the process of replicating the results, so the effect is probably real, but the editor should still be informed.

First I had to argue my advisor and her co-author into agreeing that the mistake should be reported at all, on the grounds that it isn't up to us (them the original authors, me from the same lab). Then I dragged them through drafting a letter to the editor. Then my advisor decided that it should be a brief report instead, because the post-hoc explanation for why the results were only marginal was "interesting". And then she sat on the revisions for months. And then when I started pushing her to get me the draft back, she said that the delays weren't due to her new baby, but because she didn't consider the project a priority. This was right after she updated our lab's manuscripts page, with this revision right at the bottom, after even the revisions with a deadline in March.

I have said repeatedly that I want revisions by the end of December. I gave her several weeks' warning on this. I have explained that I will write my own letter to the editor if I don't get them, because her concerns about the ethics of cutting out the original authors on this are outweighed by my concerns about the ethics of going almost a year knowing that there is an error in the results without informing the editor, or anyone outside our lab.

I'm preparing to negotiate. I just can't sit back and have this always be the lowest priority, because new projects and manuscripts are always being added that will be higher priority, by virtue of having an actual deadline, but I'm not quite so anal as to demand revisions by the end of the month, as reasonable as that seemed when I first set the date. Perhaps I should be more laid-back about an error when the overall idea is probably correct, and this really should be my advisor's lowest priority. But I can't convince myself of that. It's a relatively minor ethical issue, but I can't help wondering if this is how she would react if we didn't have some reason to argue that the results didn't change that much.

Someone Thinks I'm Accomplished

As I trailed my dad around his office Thursday afternoon, so he could introduce me to the manager helping him with the new company website for which I will be writing content over the next two weeks (I get to add a brief stint as a Technical Writer to my resume, and make enough money to pay for April's conference registration fees), I discovered that I'd given him a whole new realm of bragging rights.

Tuesday afternoon, in my last e-mail check before heading out of town, I discovered the e-mail informing me that the submission of my first real article was "accepted pending minor revisions". I happily informed my dad as we waited for luggage Wednesday evening, and he happily informed everyone at the office who either recognized me or wondered why this tall young woman in jeans was following around their IT person. He couldn't remember the name of the journal, but then, I couldn't really remember the title of the paper (I remember the witty pre-colon part, but not the official post-colon jargon).

It's not quite enough to make up for the comps "passed with conditions", since "accepted with minor revisions" is much the same (the work of trying to coordinate minor changes with 2 co-authors is about the same as the work of trying to rewrite an entire paper by myself). But at least being able to deliver the news in person and hear the bragging makes me feel less of a loser for still being in graduate school and so far from graduating.

Finally, Something Was Accepted

Technically, I didn't get much work done over my week-long Thanksgiving break. I responded to some student emails, I commented on my thesis student's end-of-semester paper, I contemplated my future. But, I feel very accomplished, because not one but both of my poster submissions to a major conference in my field were accepted.

This marks my first acceptance in anything (besides the master's thesis itself, I suppose) since I came to graduate school. My first poster, my first "publication" of any type, my first conference. Every other poster submission, workshop application, grant application, etc. has been rejected. So, four years into my graduate studies, and I finally have something with my name on it that can go on my CV. In fact, I have two of them.

One of the posters will be the only form of publication that my master's thesis gets, because I'm still refusing to follow through on anything that would make it paper-worthy. I almost refused to do the poster submission, but my advisor encouraged me to give her some way of citing the research in future. And perhaps the poster will make me feel like I actually accomplished something with that thesis.

InaDWriMo

I am amused that just as InaDWriMo starts, I have run out of things to write.

The comps paper, although giving me a taste of exactly how hard it is to throw together 50,000 words (coming in at ~8,500, but definitely something like 25,500 if you count all the words that got deleted and/or rewritten), is done. The hellish tyring-to-get-something-published paper (which had a cap of 3,000 words anyway) was submitted months ago and is still under review. The related hellish trying-to-badger-collaborators-into-writing-correction paper has been languishing in my advisor's inbox for just as many months, and is unlikely to return to me before the Thanksgiving break. My honors thesis student finished her Intro/Methods draft and lab presentation in October, and doesn't need to be writing anything else right now. The only other research worth mentioning has been submitted as abstracts to a conference, but even if I hear back from them I won't be in a position to create the posters themselves until January. There is just no research to write.

What I do have, is a 7-9 page paper for my completely-unrelated minor class due sometime this weekend, and two reviews for a grant competition to read (with a one-page writeup review for each). That's it. I might be doing a great many things this November, but writing won't be one of them.

Halfway

The comps wordcount passed the halfway mark at approximately 9:15 p.m. last night. This is the point where I finished refining a paragraph from disjointed notes into a coherent statement, and Word told me that my cursor came after 5,063 words. The cursor was sitting just over halfway down the 17th double-spaced page.

No, I am not going to force myself to get to 10,000 words, the lower limit of the "expected length" range we were given. I am going to make the points I need to make, citing as many of the 116 journal articles on my reading list as I can. My advisor's inevitable requests for clarification may put me into the proper range, of course, but I prefer to keep to concise statements rather than try to make an arbitrary word count.

The most frustrating thing about a theory paper is that I have no idea whether any of what I'm saying is true, or even reasonable. Have I somehow missed huge swathes of the literature, or misread critical points? I try to take comfort in more senior grad students' assurances that I won't be failed as long as I demonstrate some competence in theoretical arguments, but I can't help but cringe at the potential expectation that this be publication-worthy. I have enough confidence that it's accurate to base my dissertation work on it, but not to let anyone who actually knows this field look at it. Wasn't I supposed to be feeling like I had a good grasp on this topic by now?

Meanwhile, the current status of the paper is 5,459 pages, spread across a full 18 pages. Add all the notes I have on sections that are not ready for proper writing yet, and the word count is 7,234. It'd all be in good shape if it didn't have to make convincing sense.

New Year Career Crisis

Two weeks ago, I was not entirely successful in my struggles not to cry in the middle of a presentation directly relevant to the current section of my comps paper. For most of the past week, I have had an intense urge to either put my head down and cry onto my keyboard every time I have received the latest draft of four of the five papers I'm co-authoring. Diagnosis can go one of three ways:

1. Depression is rampant in our society, and every member of my immediate family (except maybe one sister) has been on medication for depression or manic depression at one point or another. I msyelf have a dubious diagnosis of depression hanging over from my freshman year of college. Perhaps it is time for professional help in regards to regulating neurochemicals.

2. Workaholicism also runs rampant in society and in my family. The pressure to get two abstracts submitted by Friday, two papers submitted before Advisor's impending delivery, help a student with her paper before that deadline, and get through a huge hurdle of my comps paper before Advisor's impending delivery, while attending two major multi-day conference/workshop sessions in two weeks and organizing the new TA orientation, has created an overabundance in stress. I spent too much of the past week and weekend working (i.e., pretty much all of it, aside from ~2 hours of exercise or leisure reading each day), and have no reserves left from my day at the beach in San Diego. I need to take a day away from campus, email, my work laptop, and reading in general.

3. What the fuck am I doing in graduate school? Progress is stalled on my comps because I have no interest in tackling the huge theoretical debate I have to tackle, but everyone else finds this interesting and worthwhile (it was the participant debate that set me off at the presentation). Endless drafts and post-review revisions and trying to write three papers on the same research is what academia is all about, so I should be thrilled to have so many studies worthy of submitting after the dearth of worthy reserach my first two years. Obviously I'm not cut out for this. Perhaps I should consider a brand new career path, maybe flipping burgers.

Deeper consideration suggests it can't just be #3. I'm giving myself a pass on my comps problems, because the huge theoretical debate is addressed in my comps only as a stumbling block: "if this take is correct, we can look at this cool manipulation; if not, well...". I would be totally into my comps if they would have just let me say #(*% the debate, it's not going to get resolved, and the evidence in favor the useful take is convincing enough to proceed. There are reasons I'm stuck with four drafts on the same idea (revisions to a publication I wasn't even part of are half of them) that are unlikely to repeat at any other point in my career (please!). There has been an ongoing career crisis in that direction for the past year or so, however.

Addressing the work overload is difficult. Thanks to comps, there's always something that needs to be done pressing on the back of my mind, so it's a matter of just ditching work rather than getting to a good stopping place. Re-evaluating assorted commitments means Friday, and probably Saturday, are now Grad Student Skip Days. My newly re-validated bus pass and I are taking off for anywhere not here. I am turning off the computers, ignoring the books, and either getting some sunshine or getting some expensive sugar.

Addressing the career crisis is less difficult. A very timely email has pointed me to a "Turning Points" career workshops just for graduate students. I will totally pay $60 for a six-week course on figuring out what I want to be when I grow up and how to be it. (Mild paranoia that three more people won't sign up to meet the 10-person minimum is adding to my stress load, however). And, I've enrolled in an entirely irrelevant education course I know nothing about (the title is probably Religion, Spirituality & Education, but abbreviations make it diffiuclt to tell) becuase I'd already maxed out tuition and fees anyway, so it's free!. Technically this adds to my workload, but the possibility of having non-optional chores with absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my research is well worth it.

And, this day is ending early. There is absolutely nothing I have to do that is better off being done today poorly than tomorrow (hopefully) rejuvenated.

The Writing Never Ends

I wrote incessantly in high school, in notebooks ranging from letter-size to a little tiny thing I kept in my back pocket should inspiration strike. The challenge back then was in finishing a story. I might start a dozen at once, with no particular plot in mind, and just write aimlessly but interestedly until the interest was lost. There's a very real limit on how much time you can spend trying to write the same thing before it becomes more burden than pleasure.

Fast forward to graduate school. The same problem still applies, only now it applies to more scientific than science fiction endeavors. There's a little thrill when the challenge is handed down: put this experiment in parent-friendly terms for our newsletter, put that experiment in easily comprehended but thoroughly scientific terms for publication. But the same problem as high school applies: there has to be an end product.

You might think experiments would be very conducive to this, because the plot is all there: introduction, method, results, conclusion. With word limits, even, to keep you on track. The plot is anchored by the methods, so the rest can't get too far away from you (although there are certainly plenty of re-analysis and re-interpretations to extend the process quite a bit). And yet...The process still never seems to end.

The problem with the experiment is that now you aren't in control. There are your co-authors, for example. This calls for extensive, sentence-by-sentence, "what if we said...let's change this...". The tweaking process is very helpful, making for a much better paper than the early drafts. Once three people have gone through 20 iterations (I'm not exaggerating. I have all the drafts saved), however, interest in writing has already begun to wane. Dramatically. You want that paper done, the .doc file cast aside permanently in favor of the immutable .pdf.

And then, once the co-authors have been pleased, there's formatting for submission, and rejection, and formatting for submission somewhere else, and NOW there's an editor and two reviewers calling for further modifications. You thought you were done - but no! Now three people have called for a minor change here, an expansion there, convince me you don't need another experiment...all of which have to be addressed in yet another round of drafts.

I should be thrilled to get a revise-and-resubmit response; it's the most favorable of any reaction to my submissions thus far (unless you count the committee passing my master's thesis, of course). My immediate reaction was - hey, that's pretty good! Nice reviews, so we didn't explain that too well, alright. And then I started putting together the list of things we would need to change. By the time I informed the co-authors, I was ready to start banging my head against my desk: I. do. not. want. to. work. on. this. any. more. My head is hardened by many years of martial arts; surely it can handle ten bangs on a cheap plywood desk?

I had the same problem with my master's thesis - too many revisions, get it the hell away from me now! But that had a firm deadline, and rather lower standards than official publication. I did it for the degree, and continued progress towards the next degree, but I'm not sure I can do it just to have my name published.

A "Thorny Ethical Question"!?

After discovering a stupid mistake in what's supposed to be a trivial matter of my Me,Y & Z paper in preparation, which fortunately didn't result in any qualitative changes in my results (things that had been significant/meaningful were still significant meaningful), we discovered that the same error was in Y & Z (2007). This time the re-analysis was bad; what had been reported as significant was in fact not quite significant. The trend was there, my results showed the effect was real, but the published data set would normally have been presented as "not meeting conventional levels of significance" and so wouldn't have gotten published.

Y, my co-author and lead author on the first paper, had the following response:

"What do you think? Are we obligated to point out the PS flaw in the earlier paper? Would doing so help or hurt the current paper? A thorny ethical question..."

And I went off and had a mild conniption fit.

I was fully on-board with Y's attempts to find a spin to put on the sudden non-significance of the results. The finding is valid, check this other paper; there was this or that confound so we can explain why those results didn't actually turn out. But the suggestion of just ignoring the problem, even on the basis of "more recent/better studies do show the effect is real..." entirely set me off.

The problem is that the original paper, and our summary of the original paper, make a great deal of "is significant even controlling for PS". And it turns out that there was no control of PS at all, there was just control for some nonsensical number value they/we thought was PS. The stats show the important effect is still significant when PS isn't controlled, but all those arguments about how it's beyond and better than this trivial measure are suddenly invalid.

Z, the established name on both papers and my advisor, has not yet weighed in on this issue. The two dozen emails we sent on this matter had panic only in the body, not the subject lines, so s/he prioritized other things and may not even know about the problem yet. I'm hoping, almost desperately, that Z will state that they must issue a correction about the recently-published paper and address this in the current manuscript. I don't care if our almost-ready-for-submission paper has to be changed drastically over another three months of drafts in some attempt to salvage the original set of results. I am going to have a mild nervous breakdown if my advisor decides to let wrong results stand. It's bad enough that the possibility of errors in the papers I read looms large in my mind every time I even glance at a journal. I will lose all my faith in science if faced with respected members of the field explicitly deciding not to correct mistakes they find after publication.

The arguments against correction would boil down to this: that original data set isn't significant, but we can look at Me, Y & Z to show that the effect is real, and the original data would have been significant if we'd kept the experiment going a little longer. To me, this is an excellent basis for the letter of correct, just lacking the specific details, but is completely unsatisfactory for not sending a correction at all. It's the slippery slope of ethics. If people don't correct mistakes that change the meaning of the results for a "good" reason, they might decide not to correct results for a "bad" reasons. Full disclosure is one of the foundations of science, that allows us to decide whether to trust the results (of a specific paper or an author's body of work) and figure out for ourselves what might really be going on instead of taking the author's word on it.

Now, if my advisor argues against making a formal correction, do I go to someone about it? That's where the nervous breakdown comes in...

Data Panic Attack

Lab meetings are very useful things. Yesterday we presented our paper (X, Y, & Z, in preparation) to the lab, my fellow graduate students and an assortment of undergraduate RAs. And one of the graduate students asked a very simple question that has snowballed into massive implications for the published paper (Y & Z, 2007). Meaning, the published data may turn out to be wrong. What was reported and published as significant, and thus meaningful, may turn out to be beyond the accepted cutoff for significant, and thus not meaningful at all.

What exactly is wrong? It was really quite basic. To answer the key question in both of these papers, something has to be factored out. I got quite sick of writing "even controlling for [average z-score]", but it was really an important point. The grad student asked a very simple question about what the difference between groups on this z-score was. And we discovered that the z-score measure was wrong.

For those not in the know, a z-score makes data relative. It tells us how far from the average a certain score is. If the z-score is -2, it's very far smaller than average; if it's 0, it's exactly average; if it's +1.5, it's higher than average. The problem is that I told my statistics package, "give me the z-score for Measure1. give me the z-score for Measure2. give me the average of those z-scores", not realizing that "smaller than average" is good for Measure1 but bad for Measure2. So this average z-score is 0 if both scores were good, or if both scores were bad. In sum, were weren't "controlling for [average z-score]" at all, we were controlling for something entirely nonsensical.

The good news it that this doesn't affect my data. I fixed the z-scores. The statistics actually turn out slightly better for all the critical measures, so I just had to update a lot of post-decimal point numbers to reflect the changes.

The bad news is that, as far as I can tell, this really does affect the original, published study. The statistics have gone from being "significant" to being what we grad students usually term "marginally significant" when forced to present something, anything, to the rest of the department. It's enough to make us think the effect is real, but nowhere near strong enough for publication.

I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I am waiting confirmation from Y that I understood his near-incomprehensible column headings on the original data file. With any luck, I pulled the wrong column for the raw data, and the right column will magically leave the important effect as significant. Maybe I just have too much of an ego to doubt my interpretation of the column names, but I don't think I'm that lucky.

This is too much for a graduate student working on a first publication. There aren't even any poster presentations on my CV, and now I may be about to find out what happens when you find a massive error in data after something has already been published. This strikes me as being rather backward in training. I'd prefer to have the confidence of an actual publication before discovering that publications can be just plain wrong and perhaps shouldn't be trusted.

At least I can console myself that the "obvious" error in the z-score calculation was also made by Y, who was an experienced post-doc at the time (now an assistant professor). I'm sure this will be great comfort as I spend the next 24 hours stepping through each data calculation and analysis for the nth time just to make sure that all the statistics are as accurate as we can make them.

Circle of References

My thesis is being turned into two submissions. They cover two separate ideas, two separate sets of analyses, even two mostly-separate subsets of tasks. But just to demonstrate how interconnected the papers are, they refer to each other. It's not as bad as it could be, which would be each referencing the other as being "in preparation". The short conference submission referenced "X, Y, & Z (in preparation)"; XYZ references "X & Z (submitted)". Still, I couldn't help but hear theme music from "The Lion King" started running through my head. If I had any brainpower left over from writing them, I'd try to parody the music into "The Circle of References".

3,883

The thesis has successfully been trimmed to 3,883 words. The palindromic number wasn't intentional, although I would have tried for it if I'd been slightly over. I say "trimmed", but everything except the methods has been changed drastically. New organization, new arguments - the discussion is barely recognizable, which is just as well since I hated writing the discussion of the thesis.

The paper is most certainly better, making me think I might just have a chance of it being accepted. The thesis itself has become even more of an albatross...this long, huge thing that didn't even do a good job of getting the necessary points across. My own bound copy will still be given some pride of place on my bookshelf, but it is the shorter paper I will provide to anyone who wants to know what I did to get that diploma. Because I'd rather they actually read and be impressed by the research than heft and be impressed by a huge tome.

Authorship Update

A compromise has been reached. Although my advisor prefers to err on the side of inclusion, adv accepted that there isn't enough time in this case (Proceedings submission due next Friday) to get them the prospective additional authors up to speed and give them some input in the submission itself. It's all in the phrasing...inclusion doesn't sound so great once you realize you're telling colleagues "we're putting your name on this, but not giving you the chance to make suggestions or even approve of it".

Should we attempt to get published in an official journal (Proceedings aren't "archival", so rules against double-publishing don't apply), an offer of authorship will be made to those who may feel some shared ownership of the project, with a careful and courteous explanation for why they were omitted from the poster. Which is fine with me; I don't mind sharing authorship, I just feel queasy with the potential of being author on a work you've never seen.

Authorship where Authorship is Due?

In a community known for the moniker of "publish or perish", it should come as no surprise that debate about authorship and credit are rampant. Information about authorship policies was volunteered as enticement in grad school interviews. Authorship order has been debated in the hallways of my department (or at least in one doorway), and interpretations of authorship have been discussed in everything from comics to scientific studies. Articles now come with a variety of disclaimers about what contributions each person made (whose idea was it, who collected/analyzed data, who wrote), or that authorship was determined alphabetically.

I had never felt the need to involve myself in these debates: my advisor lets students first-author their own research as a matter of course, and I'm not so committed to academic life that I particularly worry about "perishing". Still, I was intrigued by the results of the scientific study mentioned above, which have recently become even more relevant for my academic life.

According to that scientific study, the first author of three would be perceived to have been involved in 37% of the initial conception, 57% of the work performed, and 33% of the supervision. The last author - by convention in psychology, the "head honcho" - gets 20% of the work performed, but 49% of the initial conception and 54% of the supervision. The middle author gets the leftovers - considered to have contributed a meaningful but relatively small portion of the work.

At the time I came across that study, I was writing up a single paper as first author of three. I found the results to be acceptably reflective of the work each of us had put into this paper, certainly far more accurate than the comic (although of course you're hearing from a biased perspective). I was only tangentially involved in the inception ("hey, we can use those tasks in my thesis work, and then if nothing else we can have a replication to talk about..."), did all the data collection, and performed all the data analyses (with a great deal of electronic hand-holding from the second author). The head honcho, far from not having read the paper, holds most of the responsibility for its current organization, and several of the analyses.

Now, I keep mentally returning to that study because there may be a dispute of authorship on a related writeup, the attempt to get my master's thesis published. From this broader perspective the second author isn't really involved. The task he programmed and trained me on was just one of four, and even the results of that task are from a different angle than the one he helped with. He doesn't know what the results for the other tasks are, may even not remember what the other tasks are, if he ever knew. I have heard enough against author list inflation to think he belongs in the acknowledgments, not in the author list.

I'm not sure how intense my advisor's position on this author list is. His inclusion only comes up at all because the author list was copy-pasted from the smaller writeup. Upon consideration, adv might agree with me. Not wanting confrontation, however, my first volley in the debate is to turn in the first draft with just two authors listed. Perhaps adv will accept this without comment. If not, I will list the purported second author's contributions, and point out their similarity to the contributions of a person who is firmly in the acknowledgments.

The real question that preys on my mind is what to do if adv doesn't accept these arguments. I want this work published, and I don't need my relationship with my advisor to be any more rocky than it already is, so I'm not sure I can outright refuse to accept a superfluous author. If I let it happen, though, I know it'll bug me from here until eternity and forever tarnish my opinion of whatever paper we get out of this. Academic honesty meets academic authority...rock, meet hard place.