How to withdraw ones name from an already published paper I am having the following trouble. Within a collaboration I was asked to prepare and pre-characterize some samples. I did so and sent the samples along with a report on the characterization results.

A year later I received a first draft of a paper: some paragraphs related to the collaborators experimental technique some copy paste of older papers of his. I thought I could safely ignore this as it was just meant to signal "we are working on this!".

Next thing I get (four months later): Mail from the submitting author


  Congratulations, paper accepted!


I asked him to send me the draft: Nothing!

Six weeks later, after having met one of his PhD students at a conference the submitting author sends me the proof from the publisher for proofreading. I come up with six pages of corrections (ranging from basic logical errors in argumentation to manipulative data representation), sent it to all coauthors (I assumed the others also might not have seen the manuscript before) and received zero feedback.

Paper was published two weeks later with most of my grammatical and semantical corrections incorporated.

I asked my boss (also co-author on the paper) how to deal with it. His answer: "Take it as one more paper and forget it!".

However, I do agree with this attitude. Now the tricky part: I never agreed on the authorship nor explicitly disagreed (hoping to bring the paper in a decent shape and considering the amount of work already put in). Should I adress the editor asking to withdraw my name arguing that I basically had not seen the paper? Or should I also point out the obvious flaws which might lead to a complete rejection?
The most effective and natural method would be to simply ask, possibly explain your situation if needed, to the editor or publisher of the paper.

If you have more issues with the publication, you are free to mention them, but this is mostly orthogonal to whether you want your name on the possible publication.

It would also be a good idea to inform your co-authors of this decision, as they may take it badly if they aren't notified.