Before our first meeting please read the following materials:
Scenario for Discussion: Four Characters in Search
of Authors
Student Simon has been working for Professor Garfunkel building an apparatus for performing a particular photo-excited probe measurement on semiconductor devices. A preliminary paper on the method has been submitted by Simon and Garfunkel to the Conference on Semiconductor Device Characterization. A student friend of Simon's, Janet, tries the probe on her device with Simons's help, and gets some terrific results. Janet's supervisor, Professor Quick is very excited about the results and immediately suggests submitting a paper to the Device Research Conference, which has a submission deadline in a few days. Janet, of course, is pleased, and quickly prepares the text of a draft abstract, which she then gives to Quick for editing. Because the paper submission deadline is imminent, Quick edits the abstract into final form and prepares to ship it by FedEx to the Conference. He shows Janet a copy while they are waiting for FedEx to pick it up. Janet notices that only she and Quick are listed as authors, which makes her uneasy. What now?
Scenario by S. D. Senturia
Questions on "Four Characters" Scenario:
What kind of credit do Simon & Garfunkel deserve, and why?
Would acknowledgement of Simon's experimental help be enough?
Or should there be an explicit citation by reference? Or even co-authorship?
Would it make a difference if Simon and Garfunkel had already published a
journal paper on the subject?
What can/should Quick do, (or have done)?
Was Quick too quick?
What can / should Janet do (or have done)?
SCENARIO: Co-authorship Conventions
You and your Doctoral supervisor in Computer Science have been
collaborating with a medical research team. Because your thesis has direct
potential applications in a new medical technology, your research funding
for the year has been provided by the medical school lab directed by Dr.
Distinguished.
You have prepared a paper for publication and show your draft to one of
your medical co-authors. Your co-author tells you that Dr. Distinguished's
name is conventionally included as the final author on work funded by his
lab. You object that Dr. Distinguished has no idea of what the research is
about. Your co-author explains that listing the lab head as last author is
often the practice in medicine, and it certainly is "local custom" here.
What, if anything, can and should you do?
Scenario by A. R. Meyer
SCENARIO: Co-author or Compete?
Alice, a graduate student working on cryptography, attends a research
conference talk by Bob, a former graduate student in her own department who
is now a prominent researcher. By the end of the talk, Alice realizes
Bob's scheme is vulnerable to a cryptographic attack she has been
developing for her dissertation. During the question/answer session, she
raises her concerns. Bob admits that he had not considered an attack like
Alice's.
Back home, Alice thinks further about Bob's scheme and comes up with a
modification which repairs its weakness. She writes a short technical note
describing her results.
Alice has observed that in her field, attacks on proposed cryptography
schemes are frequently more interesting than the attacked schemes
themselves and are often considered publishable results. So she sends her
technical note to Bob with a cover letter proposing that either
(a) she and Bob co-author a journal paper based on his conference paper
along with her attack and fix, or
(b) Alice proceed alone to submit her technical note to the next conference.
Bob replies that he had already found a fix to his scheme similar to
Alice's and has written a followup note of his own intended for the next
conference. He does not think it would be fair to include Alice's name in
the journal version of his paper, since he has done essentially all the
work. He offers no other suggestions for cooperation.
What if anything can and should Alice do?
(Revised version of a scenario submitted by Rosario Gennaro, MIT EECS Area II Grad Student, October, 1995)