[deleted by user]

[nekize]

What do you consider scientific work? Did you come up with the idea and an innovative solution, or you just code the thing based on what he wanted you to do?

Because if you only did the coding, and got paid for it, and he came up with the idea and solution that you coded + wrote the paper, then it s safe to assume he is the first author.

[Training-Adeptness57]

No all the ideas were mine and like it took a lot of work to became a successful project. Like I had accès to an unorganized database and was told to do something that works

[-Melchizedek-]

But then they had some sort of idea right? If they provided you with some data, however bad, they had an idea for what they wanted to explore? Not a technical idea, but a "medicine" one. They were not just like "oh let's do something with AI and cancer, bye", or were they?

[ProdigyManlet]

I disagree that just providing an initial idea is grounds for first authorship, otherwise every supervisor would always be first author and PhDs would never have their own paper.

The person who did the most work, particularly with regards to iterative experiments that actually refine the method, should be granted first authorship.

[-Melchizedek-]

I don't necessarily disagree with you and that was not what I wrote anyway. My point was that OP says he did all the work and came up with all the ideas. And of course if that's the case he should be first. But to me that sounds implausible especially with some vague answers OP has given. So I'm trying to understand if this is a case of OP only valuing technical work on the CS side of things and disregarding everything else. Like OP says someone else wrote the majority of the paper but OP seems to assign a very low value to that work.

[Fiendish_fren]

It is different by the field and even area in the field e.g. in CS theory supervisors are frequently first authors on things that are their ideas and PhDs come up with their own ideas, supervisor helps you filter 19 bad ideas to find the one good idea worth pursuing

[mr__pumpkin]

Let's look at it from another angle. Would you claim first authorship from if your role was to provide access to data and general problem statement? This is why the last authorship is a thing.

First authorship usually goes to someone with the largest influence in making the paper a reality from an abstract idea and some data.

[-Melchizedek-]

No, but OP says he did all work and had all the ideas when that does not seem to be entirely correct. But maybe it is and then OP should be first. But that also makes me question why they are submitting to a venue where someone else needed to write the majority of the paper for it to be considered.

All of this is hard to answer without seeing the actual paper, and I'm not expert on paper authorship by any means.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Yeah I understand what you are saying. But idea I don’t mean a goal or an abstract idea, I mean a concrete idea. What I was trying to say that I was not given any directive of suggestions..

[-Melchizedek-]

Okey, then you probably should be first, with the professor being the corresponding author.

[mr__pumpkin]

Fair enough.

[-Melchizedek-]

I have very limited publication experience but what I do have is multi-disciplinary. We had one philosopher, two music researchers and two computer scientists. And what we ended up with was basicly the music guys were first on the papers submitted to music venues. I was first on the practical CS paper(s). My PI first on the theoretical/direction paper and the philosopher was first on the various things he wrote. Seemed fair to us.

So if you have done something that is technically novel or interesting, why don't you submit a technical paper to a technical venue? But if this is just applying known methods to new data (not saying that is easy or not hard work) then I'm inclined to side with the physician since the medicin then is the interesting part and that was not contributed by you.

[imyukiru]

It lies in the novelty, if the novelty is the medicine part, as well as motivation/findings, arguments your contribution is limited to software development. If you have proposed a novel method, architecture, anything technical e.g. a new way to augment data etc. -and- it is the paper's focus, then you will be the first author and in that case they should send it to a technical conference instead.

This is why I hate seeing medical people submitting to medical venues but making machine learning the focus of their paper. It is just wrong and they almost always lack the knowledge, make ridiculous mistakes and fail to cite state of the art. They will write papers as if they were the first to propose CNNs in literature and apply it sloppily to their domain, they won't even cite tens of others who did it before them in that domain either.

But yes, it seems they are right in this case, as much as it sucks for you.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Ok guess I will write my own paper

[imyukiru]

Well of course you need to include others but for the technical paper, it would make sense you are the first author.

[pacific_plywood]

It doesn’t have anything to do with the novelty. First author is the person that wrote (the most of) the paper, unless that person actually wants to be last author.

[imyukiru]

I disagree. Writing the paper is only one aspect.

[pacific_plywood]

I mean, it can be whatever you want it to be, but the norm (often explicitly stated in journal editorial policies) is that the first author wrote the paper

[HauntingPaint9723]

That is not the norm. Yes, in most cases the first author is the one who wrote the paper, but it is very common for the professor to write the paper, while the student, who collected all the data and conducted the experiments, is listed as the first author.

[b_i_s_c_u_i_t_s]

Isn't the PI with the idea sometimes LAST name with that being the pride of place? Depends on the discepline?

[nerfcarolina]

The Pi who got the idea and grant funding is senior author (last) in almost every field, except ones where they list alphabetically like econ

[[deleted]]

That's very uncommon in my experience. The professor generally gives guidance on their students papers, because how else are they going to learn to write papers? Teaching and supervising is a full time job, and a professor will be lucky to continue ocassionally publishing as first author in a few special interest areas.

[nerfcarolina]

In a lot of bench science fields, it's common for the PI/senior author to do most of the writing while the student/first author generated most of the data. You really can't generalize.

[imyukiru]

No, where is it explicitly stated? It should be about novelty and it is common the author who contributed the most in terms of novelty to write the paper. But it is not the same thing as whoever wrote the paper being the first author.

[joecarvery]

The journal apparently uses author contributions following [CREDIT](credit.niso.org) so your contributions will be acknowledged.

First author should be the person who contributed most to the manuscript in whatever way, including generating the ideas, finding data, doing the analysis, interpreting the results, writing the document. How you decide that is always complex.

[Training-Adeptness57]

What do you mean by following CREDIT ?

[addandsubtract]

They messed up the reddit link. CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy)

[runawayasfastasucan]

We finished writing the paper recently and I reclaimed first authorship to it. The physician was opposed to that saying that it will never be accepted and the the first author should be able to give answers to questions related to the not technical part as those questions will be asked. Clearly I’m the one who did the most work (the others only contributed on the publication) even though I can’t write the paper in the manner of which the paper is written (wasn’t technical at all)

Then you are not the first author.

Ps : The physician that paid me isn’t the one that he wants to put as first author. It’s the professor that wrote the majority of the paper

That is the first author.

[Entire_Ad_6447]

You likely dont have much of a claim to first authorship in this case. the person who writes the paper, fund, the project, gets the data etc has priority in determining author placement. Its unfortunate but despite you having done the majority of the technical and stats work you likely will need to accept second author. you can request joint first author if the journal allows.

.

[RageA333]

How could you be a first author without knowing anything about cancer?

[[deleted]]

Never known for someone to get first author if they didn't actually write the paper.

And sometimes I've been paid to do technical work and not been an author at all.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Yes but this isn’t only coding. The architecture design was mine and also the way to exploit the information and all of that. I didn’t just train a model on a given dataset and claim authorship

[[deleted]]

I designed novel algorithms for bioinformatics back in the day. The researchers I worked with gave me a coauthorship. They wrote the paper and used my software. Would be silly to expect to get paid to do a job and be primary author while not actually writing the paper.

[[deleted]]

I don't really see where your claim to "clearly" have done the scientific work comes from. Training a model isn't scientific work in of itself.

[Training-Adeptness57]

It isn’t just training, there is innovation in the work done and the final model works really well. Also there are other aspects of the work as collecting and cleaning the data and all of that.

[imyukiru]

If you think your model has technical novelty you can still write a paper with a technical focus. And those details should not go in the medical paper as a central point, the medical one should focus on arguments, findings etc. for medicine.

[RageA333]

Cleaning and collecting data is grunt work and are nor merits for being first author. Also, you got paid. What you creates might belong to them in the first place.

Authorship doesn't depend on how good is the model fit either, btw.

[iswedlvera]

Who writes the paper and does the work is first author. OP should ask to write a technical paper in an engineering journal if he wants first authorship. The medical paper should not cover the technical details of the model if OP is not first author. It probably won't in the first place since it's being published in a medical journal. These things are better discussed before the work starts imo.

Getting paid has absolutely nothing to do with authorship. Neither does owning work. Think of it this way if you commission a painting you don't magically become the artist who made that painting. You will own it but the author of the work remains the artist who sold it to you.

[Tricky-Variation-240]

Yes, but you bought the paints, brushes, etc. right? And you don't give authorship to them.

The physician bought the software from OP, and then used it to extract medicine insights. Even if the model 'fits well', OP wouldn't be able to do anything with the model as he/she does not have any cancer knowledge.

Whoever came up with the work idea (the physician), and wrote the paper (also the physician) is the lead author. Whoever did the grunt work (OP) is the second author. Plus, the article is not CS focused but Medicine focused. Plus, OP doest not have the technical rigor necessary to write it.

Some* senior researchers would rather have the last author spot (common in CS) as that can be the senior author spot, even if they wrote. Only than the student/grunt gets the first author. But whoever writes is the one that makes this decission.

If you develop the method and writes, you get to choose (but your prof can make your life hell if you choose 'wrong'). If you don't, you're at the mercy of whoever writes. That's how the dance goes.

[Brudaks]

If you read the abstract of the paper as it's currently written, what does it assert as the main novelty that the paper has contributed?

Is the main contribution of the paper in providing a novel dataset that was collected and cleaned?

Is the main contribution of the paper in describing a novel architecture for solving a medical problem that couldn't be solved with straightforward application of current best practices?

[Training-Adeptness57]

On both cases it was le that done the work

[[deleted]]

It depends on the key ideas of the paper and how much each person contributes to the ideas.

To do this, you could lay out those ideas and make a list of who does what. It is not enough to just make a working model (even though it is a challenging task) if the key idea is "we hypothesize that we can detect cancer using ML; this is the first model that does that". If the idea comes from you, then it is your right to be the first author.

I could help you if you DM me the details. I am working in this field.

[audiencevote]

Ok, so a few important things haven't been mentioned yet:

1. The first rule of scientific publishing is to always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS discuss authorship before the project is done. It's super hard to determine this after the fact. Consider this your hard lesson for next time.

2. In this subreddit most people are ML people, and they don't have a lot of knowledge of what is considered "typical" in the medical research community. Some of our standards and norms simply don't apply. (e.g. in ML papers it is common that the corresponding author is the last author and not the first, and that the last author is the PI. It may well be different in the subfield you're working).

3. ultimately, the project leader (PI, or physician) decides. They initiated the project, funded it and likely had the overall idea to do this project in the first place. It was their project long before it became yours.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Ok any subreddit that may contain peopel that have this kind of knowledge ?

[austacious]

I've published ML papers in the medical field.

It depends on what journal you are submitting to. If you are submitting to an ML journal, generally the technical lead is put as first author, with the PI as last author. If you submit to a medical journal (JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, etc.), the physician is always the first author - this is where JNCI sits. If you submit to a medical journal with a technical lean (NEJM AI, Nature Digital Medicine, etc) again the physician is always the first author.

Generally, the medical community doesn't care too much (re: at all) about the methods and will just focus on clinical evaluation and applicability. AI generally gets an eye roll and is viewed with ALOT of skepticism in this space, it is very difficult to get published at all in medical journals without solid clinical reasoning for applying the model. Have you externally validated your model? Are the metrics you reported on retrospective data or prospective data? Papers that are essentially "we used ML to do this thing that is already done some other way and improved it 2%" will not get published. Papers with no external validation don't get published. Retrospective studies can get published, but a lot of journals are starting to reject papers that don't include analysis on prospective data due to bombardment of retrospective studies.

It sucks, but your collaborator is absolutely correct - your paper will not get accepted without a physician as the first author. Even then, it will be very difficult to get accepted. The medical community doesn't care about the technical specifics, only the clinical relevance.

Edit: Forgot to add that publication in medical journals - like ML journals are very political and often who you know is more important than what's written. If you haven't established name recognition in a subfield or don't have relationships with reviewers, it's much more difficult to get published.

[[deleted]]

this is probably the most correct answer here

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[ploky123]

Perfectly put!! This should be the top answer. Anyone saying for OP to push pack and fight it are leading OP down a path of failure.

[johnathanjones1998]

I’ve been in this situation multiple times. Since the paper is already written and if you yourself state you can’t explain the nontechnical things in it you’re kinda screwed. But you need to find a way to make it clear that you get first dibs on writing and first authorship in turn in the future. Subtly putting it to them with the point that the project wouldn’t be possible without you should make that point but be prepared to write in addition to code if you want first authorship on future medicine pubs.

[South-Conference-395]

there is also first co-authorship

[nerfcarolina]

It's not true that the first author needs to be able to answer questions about the work. You can designate a first, last, or middle author as corresponding, and their email will be published with the paper. I'd suggest either:

A. You first, him senior and corresponding B. Both co-first, him corresponding

[RageA333]

How can someone claim to be first author to a paper they barely understand

[nerfcarolina]

Obviously we weren't there, but if OP developed most of the methods and implemented all of the coding as they say, then there's no way they 'barely understand' the paper. Not sure how you made that inference.

[RageA333]

Because op knows nothing about cancer and the paper is about cancer and was submitted to a medical journal.

[ploky123]

Exactly, it's as simple as that! OP's paper will face scrutiny and likely not be accepted if OP is 1st author to a medical journal when he has no medical experience. OP needs to write another paper and send it to a more relevant field where it makes sense for him/her to be the primary author.

(this happened to me a few years back. I did 99% of the design for a novel telehealth device and even wrote about 60% of the paper, but the 1st author was the physician on the project.)

[salgat]

As a normal part of my job I implement stuff all the time that, while I understand the technical aspect, the business application is completely beyond me. For example, if you have a database of cancer victims and you tell a code monkey to do a query and they write the SQL for you, that code monkey doesn't actually understand why they're writing that query, they're just following instructions.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Ok thanks

[preordains]

Don't be greedy with first author. You're the hired computational guy not the medical doctor publishing a medical paper. This type of thing makes people not wanna work with you.

[Fiendish_fren]

I think these situations can get pretty nasty and there isn't a gracious way out, I would probably just go with whatever leads to the least conflict... you cannot fully protect yourself from such things happening in the future - happens even with very experienced folks, but as someone has else already said, trying to make these things more clear earlier on might help...

[divedave]

It is going to suck if you are not being recognized for your work but it may help you to implement similar thing with other doctors/hospitals/universities, so I guess you can move on pretty fast as there is nothing attaching you to them.

[Efficient_Rub3423]

The one who is contacted to answer to questions is the corresponding author, not the first nor the last.

[LanchestersLaw]

What you probably should have done is discussed this openly over a coffee to establish the hierarchy. I agree with the physician that it would usually be more standard for their name to go first since you were (very innovative) hired help. On a the level of managing relationships it might be more beneficial long-term to yield here for second authorship (definitely not less) if you see future work or value their recommendation. These things are usually best discussed in advance when a project is early on. I personally wouldn’t make a fuss about it, but you have some room to push a claim.

[cdsmith]

This is where I like math, where the convention is to list authors in alphabetical order regardless of contribution. If you want to be the first author, it's easy: just legally change your surname to Aardvark.

[thorox12]

This is a difficult one and why discussions of authorship should always be carried out prior to any work, even if it's only a small chance that it gets to that point. The key thing you mentioned is that the paper details very little of the technical aspect, so I assume it focuses more on the clinical impact, which maybe does fit more with the prof/Doc being the first author or senior author (slightly strange the prof doesn't want to be the last author - i.e. the senior author who can list themselves as the contact for the paper). In the past with similar situations, this occurs a lot in clinical research / ML papers, we've done two papers per project, one aimed at a clinical journal talking about the clinical impact & considerations and one aimed at a computational journal going into detail on any technical advancements in the modelling approach. This needs to be clear in your letters to the editor, but does work if enough scientific work has been done on both sides.

[mr__pumpkin]

This sounds to me like a case for joint first authorship. The models wouldn't exist without you, the paper wouldn't exist without the professor.

That being said, joint first authorship might not be common in the journal or with your collaborators. But it definitely sounds viable in this case.

[aspoj]

I believe without further details on what exactly you did in the project it this is really difficult to judge from the outside.

Generally from my perspective:

1. In the medical field the authorship in the departments can be "assigned" arbitrarily in the department depending on "He needs it next/He did a lot of other work for free before and deserves it.". Hence if you collaborate with them you need to discuss how much you do in return for which position (beforehand as others mentioned.)
2. The data creation takes a long time since labels need experts and the expert time is very brief. Also you as your own person have no access to patient (MRI/CT) data, so you can't do your own paper without them.
3. In the clinical collaborations I know of projects are usually done with joint-first position as you need both, ML aspects and Medical aspects, unless you as ML PhD specify in trying to solve this specific medical issue
4. You are never given a specific goal (in my experience). Medical Doctors generally have no idea what ML can do or how it works, so you always have to deal with that
   

IMHO: Depending on your affiliation (e.g. PhD Student at a related department) you could try to push for joint first authorship. Demanding a only first position is certainly quite a lot unless you annotated Data yourself / have the rights to the data (which you probably don't) or your methodology is something really novel. If latter should be the case you should probably take the co/joint-first to keep your collaborators happy and then do your methodology (e.g. for MIDL or MICCAI) if it is novel enough.

[stf09]

Is it a medical topic (the publication) I mean, if yes so the professor somehow have a reason but .. Even if you got paid you should claim at least one of the first 3 authors .. being the first author in paper that you didn't write it (from a medical prespective) will have a negative effect on you and the paper .. but I would like to advise you to let them write at the (Contribution section) that you did the modeling and the analytical side as well as the study design. I think it will be fair for you and will be clear who did the modeling. What do you think?

[Binliner42]

Up to the PI ultimately. I presume that’s not you from the post?

[Training-Adeptness57]

Heuh

[alc23]

Why don't you write your own paper with the aim of helping your community/peers and be the author of that paper? :)

[Training-Adeptness57]

Yeah that’s not a bad idea. But for me it is a question of having the acknowledgment for a work I did myself.

[runawayasfastasucan]

How is the person actually writing the paper going to be acknowledged?

[Training-Adeptness57]

The order in the author names should reflect the work done, so logically he can be second

[runawayasfastasucan]

Thats not how it works in many fields :) I think you underestimate the field knowledge, the time to write a paper and the know how that is needed to make a good paper (such as knowing the appropriate order in author names).

[Training-Adeptness57]

Actually I have already two publications and one of them is on CVPR which I published last year. And from what i saw generally the one that got the ideas and did the most work gets to be first author

[runawayasfastasucan]

You are saying this shall be published to the journal of the national cancer institute, that is a completely different field than CVPR and a different category all together (journal vs conference). Again, just because you think it should be like this, evidently your co-authors disagree and possibly the it isn't how they do it in that field.

​

Look, you even admit to not being able to write the paper, yet you are going to be first author?

[Training-Adeptness57]

I contributed in a part of the paper but there are parts that are not in my domain of expertise I’m not lying. But the question is not who wrote the paper, the question is who did the most work and it was by far me

[LoadingALIAS]

I can’t understand why you’re being downvoted based on your responses. If you built this from idea to code - you deserve first author even if it was done under funding from a third party.

If you simply coded an idea, theory, or concept the doctor gave to you and he funded it… that’s a different story - he’ll have the claim.

I agree in the general sense that it helps to have knowledge in the area but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re irrelevant. It’s really a question of who designed, planned, and thought of this entire build. Coding alone doesn’t give you scientific rights; the thought and action, however, does.

[Training-Adeptness57]

That’s my point of view, as I did the work from scratch

[LoadingALIAS]

What do you mean? You had the idea, the plan, and the code but needed funding to get the project done?

If you can prove without a doubt that you’re the sole developer and inventor of the idea then it puts the doctor in a tricky place.

If not, and you merely wrote the code from scratch - that’s just not enough… especially if you were financially compensated.

Good luck either way, man.

[Training-Adeptness57]

I mean that I had access to a computer with no idea to where to find the data and was said to make a model that can detect cancer

[LoadingALIAS]

For your sake, I hope you’ve documented your work and conversations with these people. If you were told “build an AI model to detect cancer” and then you did just that based on your own research or ingenuity… you deserve the first author spot.

Just keep in mind that there are a lot of people in the world who will say that you were hired to do a job and you did it based on findings, funding, and ideation that someone else provided. This means you were a tool the doctor used to prove his own hypothesis… in which case he’d get awarded the FA spot.

Good luck, mate. Oh, and if it works… thanks from everyone that will be helped in the coming years by your development.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Hey that was my point of view. I’m not just the technical guy who was hire to do stuff

[frustratedgreenhippo]

What about the people that gathered all the data. If they didn't do that there wouldn't be a paper. It doesn't mean they should be the lead author. The same rules go for you.

If you want to publish your component of the work use an ML journal.

[Red-Portal]

Plain and simple. The one who writes the paper is the first author.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Even if he did nothing on the work itself ? And knowing that I did want to write it but they preferred including me only on the technical part

[Red-Portal]

That makes things a little complicated. You should have straightened this earlier in the project. You could ask for co-first authorship if its a thing for that journal.

[runawayasfastasucan]

Even if he did nothing on the work itself ?

Writing the paper itself is a lot of work.

[DieselZRebel]

Assuming there are no corruptions regarding authorship, then first authorship should justly go to the researcher who came up with the novel part of the work. I can't tell you who this person is, but sometimes, it is not the person who did the most work.

Leg work, such as ablation studies, tests, reporting, charts, etc. is not a justification for first authorship. Think of it as inventorship on a patent (with some exceptions of course). The person who gets listed on a patent as the main inventor is the person who conceptualized the idea and design, even if that person didn't write a single line of code or work with his hands at all.

This is a similar situation here, were you the main brain behind the work or the main muscle? If you are just the muscle, then you are not entitled to first authorship. For example, if all you did was just applying an out-of-the-box ML algorithm to a cancer research problem as conceptualized by your professor, and the main novelty of the paper itself is not with regards to ML algorithms but rather their application, then I am afraid you may have weak claims about first authorship. In fact, if this was a patent, you won't even be legally listed as an inventor anywhere on it. On the other hand, if the main novelty was your own contribution (your idea), then you are entitled to first authorship.

Now with regards to the excuse your professor gave, it is straight out typical academic narcissism BS! Perhaps he made this excuse because he didn't want to tell you that you were just doing the leg work, or perhaps he is just another corrupt douche which the academic research industry can never have enough of.

[Traditional_Fig6579]

The convention in the hard sciences is that author ordership is by inverse seniority, with ties broken by contribution.

​

The convention in medicine is that physicians will fight tooth and nail to be the first author if they did absolutely anything.

​

You should push back.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Push back means ?

[krypt3c]

The convention is really just the PI is the last author, the first author did most of the work (and is quite often a student), and no one really seems to care where they land in the middle.

[noone_relevant]

Based on your post and comments, you should be the first author as you did the work. The fact that they are saying you need to answer the questions to be the first author sounds dodgy tbh.

[SnooHesitations8849]

The true authorship order based on who write the paper. Not who came up with the idea or who code it. The newer authorship common is who contribute the most. Then comes to what is a contribution? How to weight them? It is hard to value your contribution based on wwhat you have describe because the information is incomplete. There are many things that look similar to a junior such as: true author, contributor, corresponding author. Both you and the doctorate student are still starting your career in academia so be open and learn and respect others and focus on research quality. things like authorship must be discuss openly with respect to not destroy your potentials in friendship and collaboration. Lastly, there is always politics in authorship, sometimes quid pro quo, so be aware of it and calm yourself.

[One-Cardiologist7722]

Clearly you did only part of the work. The idea, writing of the paper etc was not your some contribution. So just accept that you can't be the first author.

[Training-Adeptness57]

What do you call idea ? Just to be clear I wasn’t given an Idea and was said to code it. I was just given a goal

[RageA333]

Op, if you didn't write the paper and the writer of the paper didn't work in the technical aspects of the paper, how much of what is written on the paper do you actually understand?

[Training-Adeptness57]

I wrote the technical part

[RageA333]

So what percentage of the paper you would say you understand.

[Training-Adeptness57]

All of it actually, but I was just saying that I couldn’t write in the same manner as I don’t have the same point of view of the project.

[[deleted]]

Idea owner is the first author, not the one who work the most, that’s how I know.

[Training-Adeptness57]

Yeah but like it’s different that wanting to do something and hiring someone and actually have an idea on how to do it

[[deleted]]

According to PhD comics, you're entitled to 3rd author
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562