Is my authorship undeserved, and if so how do I address this in a professional setting? I am a current undergraduate who has been involved in a research lab for the past 3 years. Not too long after joining, I was asked to be a co-author on a paper that was already written. My PI wanted me to be recognized on a publication so I could add it to my CV, but I did not contribute or even read the paper until after it was published. I accepted this co-authorship at the time because I was excited to have a paper under my belt. Now, after gaining more experience working in academia, I realize that I clearly should not have been named a co-author.
My academic reputation is important to me as I hope to have a career in this field of research, so I want to make sure I am honest about my work. I will be applying to graduate schools soon and am concerned about how this co-authorship will affect my applications and my interviews. I have considered removing the publication from my CV, and I have also thought about keeping it on there while being honest about the situation if asked about it in interviews.
Do you have any advice on how to approach this situation? Thanks in advance!
What's past is past and can't be changed. It is good that you have learned about this issue, but I suggest that you ignore it and just list it like any other publication. There is no major harm done here, even though such &quot;gift&quot; authorship is frowned on in many (not all) fields.
If asked to explain it, just say that you were, at the time, less sophisticated as you were an undergraduate.
Alternatively, you could leave the paper off of your CV, but that can look strange if the paper surfaces.
But the bottom line here is that, as an undergraduate, inexperienced in such things, you did nothing wrong.
And, in some fields, a lot of people get listed as authors even if  their intellectual contribution was minimal, since their work is essential to carrying on the work of the lab. Whether that applies in your case, I can't say. Your advisor, PI, might be worth having a conversation about this issue. They may assure you, or not, but their opinion is worth hearing.

I need to add a few things for context. There are certainly a lot of people who don't accept what they call &quot;gift&quot; authorship in any form and so hate on answers like this one. But the question of what is a gift and what is earned can be subtle. In most fields, where one or a few people work together, without need of extensive and long running laboratories with all of the technicians that are required for that, it is a pretty simple question and gift authorship is heavily frowned on in those fields.
But there are some fields in which nothing gets done without a lot of people contributing over a long period of time. When a paper comes out of CERN, for example, the list of authors might be very long. An experiment might take years to set up and require hundreds of technicians, without whom there would be no breakthrough at all. The work is simply impossible without them. In those situations, lots of people get authorship for their contributions.
There have been a few papers, in fact, where the list of authors has been longer than the paper itself. But, in those fields, it is understood what it means and the order of authorship might be vitally important to help sort it out.
It is, I think, a mistake, for those in other fields with a different work process, to judge these people.
See, for example this paper with more than 5000 authors