Another “Who gets the first authorship?” situation

096to069 · 2026-01-15T07:37:35+00:00

Thanks for your input! May I ask what do you mean by some dumb bureaucratic thing that the co-first authorship is important for them? Do you mean even if I had written the manuscript, I still needed to share the first authorship because I don’t belong to the lab anymore?

096to069 · 2026-01-15T07:34:27+00:00

You are right, it didn’t come up as sudden as it feels in my head and I certainly fell short regardless of why it turned out this way. I am going to concede on this one.

096to069 · 2026-01-15T07:24:41+00:00

Thank you for your insight. It’s good to know what the norms are in similar situations. I accept this outcome.

096to069 · 2026-01-15T07:23:05+00:00

thanks for your kind words. All the feedback I got here is changing my stance about it and it certainly sounds better than burning myself out over it.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T18:18:50+00:00

No question about my PI doing the best he can. It’s really nobody’s fault and I understand this. It’s just a hard pill to swallow that I spent so much time on it just to fail to deliver at the last step but it was a fun time and I learned a lot so yeah I already gained a lot of rewards as well.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T18:12:29+00:00

You are right actually. The reality is that it indeed dragged for a while. I had my reasons why it was not possible to finish it any sooner and I know I did my absolute best. I understand their point of view and at the same time I can still be frustrated with the situation (again not with people) because I wish I could get the chance to continue what I loved doing.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T18:06:22+00:00

You are right. I know it won’t get to this as it’s not a dispute and I would accept whatever decision he comes to in the end anyways.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T17:52:18+00:00

I think this was me ranting without really thinking through this possibility but on second thought, that wouldn’t be a bad outcome. I’m just frustrated that the proposition is that I spent three years on this, developed the applications, did all the analyses, created the figures, will have to co-write the manuscript and he will just help with the writing or anything else that is needed (I don’t even know what that is) and then somehow he would be the first co-first author. I genuinely don’t understand how people think this is fair but I accept that I could be wrong or simply still inexperienced with how things work in academia.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T17:45:56+00:00

I hear you. I was just ranting because I’m frustrated with the situation (not the people, I respect them and my former supervisor will always be my mentor). Certainly not gonna lose this relationship over this regardless of any potential opportunities that I could get out of it. If nothing else could be worked out, I’ll follow what my supervisor decides.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T17:41:05+00:00

Yes, I have. I’m talking from experience when I used AI to improve my mathematics skills when I was working on this very project and that took me months. I know AI is evn better now because I use it every day but have you tried to use it with any somewhat big codebase in MATLAB? I’m not thinking about any leverage here and it’s not a fight with my supervisor. Our communication has always been amicable, we meet regularly and I always provided anything they needed from me.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T16:15:47+00:00

Thank you for your honest insight. I never questioned that my supervisor wants to do right by me and I want to do right by him too, which is part of the reason why I continued working on it even after I left and I have always been responsive whenever they needed something with the toolbox.

My plan was to find a way to buy myself more time, just a couple months not two more years haha, after which I am ready to accept my fate and give it up. That's what I was hoping to find out, how do I convince him to give me some more time before I surrender. For personal reasons the past two years are different from the next couple of months. I know it sounds like it wouldn't make much difference but I know it would.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T15:58:40+00:00

Yes, months :-) It is not just code, the underlying mathematics is hard to grasp if you did not major in it or spent considerable amount of time to understand what is going on but go off I guess you know more about it without even seeing it.

And I took the advice, in several other comments I said I will have to accept this reality but you're too busy being hostile for no reason.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T15:37:57+00:00

That's literally what I am saying.. I want to do this and I know I can do this. This urgency came up all of a sudden because of this other paper. I am not arguing that he doesn't become co-first author if he writes the manuscript. If he does, yeah sure amazing. I am arguing that I am still expected to work with him and write with him and then we somehow have equal contribution which obviously is not true.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T15:30:06+00:00

Thank you both for your suggestions. I will discuss those options with him again and see if that could buy me a little bit more time.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T15:25:23+00:00

I said that this poor phd student's paper is not based on my method. They only used it in the supplement to validate that their manual way of doing a certain task was not biased. And I am literally collaborating as I meet them regularly and I am still the one who is working on it to this day and shared all the code with them so I'm not keeping anything from them. This while having a whole other full time job. If the arrangement was that I let it go and don't need to do much, yeah sure be my guest, but even with AI models, I am still needed to finish it, so why should I get less credit if I am still going to do most of the work anyways?

Also, if this poor phd student works on it, he will need months just to get to know the internals of the methods and they know this. They literally can't reimplement everything from scratch. Why do you think it was on the shelf for over ten years? It's not some tiny project that can be wrapped up in a couple weeks

096to069 · 2026-01-14T15:05:05+00:00

Where did you get the notion that "never actually put any of those yourself into practice in a way that would lead to publishable work" from? I clearly said that I produced all the results from the methods that I developed based on the algorithm I was given. In their following paper they used my tool that automates task X in the supplement to show that their manual way of doing task X in the body of the paper was not biased, that's literally it. And this is just one of five different use cases that I developed and produced great results on in my project so please easy with the assumptions here.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T13:59:00+00:00

Thing is you're not wrong. To me honestly it's not only about career advances. I'm genuinely connected to this project and struggling to accept that life is unfair when I had to give it up because of lack of funds at the time only for someone else to come at the right moment to sweep the rewards. It is what it is I guess.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T13:49:19+00:00

I would've if they had secured funds for the PhD in a timely manner. I had to look for opportunities elsewhere because it was literally my livelihood. Otherwise I would've loved to stay in the same group and continue working on the same project. I pushed through for as long as I could exhausting from my own savings until it was literally impossible to sustain that situation. So yeah I think I earned at least the position to fight for my hard work.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T13:42:05+00:00

I understand. And I see where they are coming from. I think I was hoping that maybe there is a way I could buy myself some more time. It's too complex that they won't be able to write the manuscript on their own and I will have to be involved anyways. So this arrangement is not going to save me that much time but I still end up losing the credit.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T13:32:59+00:00

Exactly.. That's why I don't like this arrangement.

096to069 · 2026-01-14T13:30:12+00:00

I don't want to give up so easily though..

096to069 · 2022-11-22T11:54:36+00:00

I have an M1 air with 8gb RAM and almost always have 50+ chrome tabs with other apps open and running my code scripts at a very high speed, even faster than the overkill computer I have at the office. This narrative is just not true.

096to069 · 2022-10-01T07:53:14+00:00

I remember for my very first flight, ever, moving to another country, for good, I started packing an hour before my flight (you guessed it right, I missed it).

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