Do you need first authorship to use a publication for your PhD thesis? I'm a full-time staff assisting research. Not a student.
Jacob asked me to use the knowledge and skill that I learned during my Masters to help him do a meta-analysis for his Project as he has never done one. He told me that he wanted it to be on 'disease name' and 'target population' on 'phenomenon'. That was it. I ran with it - wrote up the protocol, did the search, initial title/abstract screening, looked through the full paper and extracted all data to see what outcomes we could pool. All throughout I shared with Jacob everything I had done through email. Jacob did not like the research question and outcome that I had decided upon because he wanted something more clinically practical - RCTs and intervention studies - except there were no papers and I indicated this to him. I reasoned with him to say that his outcome may not be clinically relevant, but I foresee it being cited many times as something that many people will probably refer to in the future.
I ask Jacob to do help with the screening as well. I send him instructions and he doesn't follow through saying that he's too busy to do this. I suggest asking a student to help, to which he refused to because he wants to do it himself. I tell him that the screening doesn't take much intellectual contribution and that the data analysis and interpretation is the most important aspect - his contribution will not be overshadowed. Time passed and a year goes by with no further progress. I continue to collect papers and contact authors for extra data during this period.
Now Jacob is claiming the meta-analysis to be his right to have first authorship for his PhD thesis. He says that I must hand over all materials to him and that he will be the one to decide on the authorship order. Never once throughout the process had I been told that this would be part of his PhD. I feel that there has been this imbalance of power - I do not know who his PhD supervisor is and they have never been involved in this process. Had there been a third party to oversee this, I feel that this process would have gone a lot smoother. I also know that I have put significant effort, time, intellectual contribution into this meta-analysis and it feels like all that work has been taken away from me.
I do not mind if Jacob uses the meta-analysis for his thesis but I would like to publish it as first author or, at the very least, first co-author with my name first. Can both Jacob and I get what we want or must he really be sole first author to be able to use the meta-analysis for hid PhD thesis?
Thank you!
Authorship issues within a group should be resolved by supervisors. This is easily found out by a simple web search or by simply asking lab members. It’s probably on your university’s website.
Authorship order can include two lead authors. This can be explicit (ie written in the submission notes) or implicit (by authorship order conventions in your community).
However, from what you describe your coauthor is abusing their position, or just given a lot of authority by the PI. If any of my students threatened a labmate they’d be in trouble. Ultimately the supervisor should decide material access, and more. Indeed, as you say - since two funding agencies are involved the two supervisors (yours and theirs) should be involved if only to agree whose grant the paper goes on.
Finally, this has nothing to do with thesis work. You can definitely include coauthored work in a thesis, with the express permission of your coauthors. I ‘donated’ a nice figure to a coauthor’s thesis and was happy to do it!