How to avoid a hostile takeover of first authorship during medical leave?

I would send an email along the following lines to the supervisor and copied to the person doing the additional piece of work. While not complete protection, this approach provides evidence and also makes it clear that the supervisor should respond if he doesn't intend to wait.

The draft article attached to the email should have a version number and date.

Dear ...

As requested, I have attached the latest draft of our paper, TITLE. It is saved at LOCATION, together with the data and analysis code. Unfortunately, I was unable to submit the draft before taking leave as planned because the data concerning XYZ was not available.

I understand that OTHER-RESEARCHER is intending to complete his/her part of the analysis while I am on leave. I will verify that analysis and integrate it with the existing paper as my first task on my return in a month. I understand that OTHER-RESEARCHER is willing to draft that section of the paper, but as lead author, I want to ensure that it is consistent with the existing message and style of the paper. I would therefore prefer that the analysis is prepared as a separate document and I will integrate it myself.

Assuming that no additional questions are raised by this final analysis, I expect to be able to circulate the complete draft within a week of my return for submission shortly thereafter. As the analysis has already taken NN months, I don't expect this delay to create any difficulties, but please let me know if you are concerned about waiting until my return for the paper to be completed.

Depending on the reason for the medical leave, it may also be appropriate to add a final paragraph:

If there are any questions about this work, I am contactable during my leave at EMAIL

It seems like the work dynamic in this place is rather perverse. Let's set that aside, though.

At all costs, this must be "resolved" prior to submission. You don't want the bun fight about authorship to leak onto the review process or, god forbid, post-acceptance or post-publication time frame.

She must protect herself. As an early career researcher, overt action may result in negative consequences in her field. If her senior is petty enough to do things like swap authorship, I shudder to think what the senior fellow can do in retaliation.

I'm not one to advocate a passive-aggressive approach to work, but if there are clear and systematic deficiencies in upholding the most basic of academic mores, what is a junior staff member left to do? There's a phrase in classics that applies here: "Festina lente" or "Make haste slowly".

In the end, she must realise that these options may not work at all. It might be that all her finessing is for naught because her senior has full control of the outputs. I would strongly suggest that she finish up and leave the lab and the institute as soon as she can.

Good luck to her.

Do let us know how this resolves.

My suggestion would be to make the paper available in some form now, to establish the existing authorship. How to do that without causing too much trouble (if that's possible) will depend on the details of the situation.

Some potential ideas:

• Give a talk about the work, with a copy of the draft to hand
• Send the paper to an interested colleague in the field (eg PhD supervisor, someone they're applying for a job with..)
• Provide the draft copy via a personal website
• Post the paper minus the final data on the arXiv (if in a suitable field), or on a personal website
• Send the paper with some query to the university research office