Possible plagiarism advice

In such issues, it pays to be ultra-clear about terminology. This is not a case of plagiarism, as the authors have (based on your description) not copied any existing published text from you. The term here is insufficient attribution.

That said, I see your situation to be in somewhat of a grey area. You have explicitly given them permission to use your work. You may have meant that they were to rewrite what you wrote and re-plot what you plotted, but it is not difficult for me to see that this may not have been what the authors understood. In all honesty, I would also not have assumed that this is what you expected to happen.

A general problem is that there really are no well-understood rules in academia how an author who has contributed significantly can recuse themselves from a collaboration — strictly speaking, the authors cannot publish without you (as you have contributed and need to be acknowledged), nor can they publish with you (as every author needs to agree to be listed as an author). The cleanest solution would have probably been if you could have written up your part in some sort of report (e.g., a preprint), which the authors could have then cited as usual, but it is evident that this is often not possible.

What would you do in this situation? Anything? Suck it up and move on?

In all honesty, I would suggest seeing this as a learning opportunity and moving on. Your claim seems way too vague and unclear to justify retracting the paper (and, honestly, if you try to get this paper retracted after you explicitly said they can use your work, you'll probably have made enemies for life). There really is not much else that can be done if the paper is already accepted.


I’m struggling to think of why you think there’s anything wrong here beyond a lack of acknowledgement.

You told them they could use the analysis and script. As you did the analysis your write up is likely to be better than any paraphrase they might come up with.

You should have been credited (can’t tell whether that should have been as an author or just acknowledged - there’s not enough information, but as you removed yourself from authorship I don’t see there’s a lot of grounds for complaint there)

Maybe you should have been more specific on how these people could use your material, but I’m not really seeing any malpractice on the part of the people who published the paper.

Next time be more specific on what permissions you’re giving.


What they did was likely unethical, but if your work wasn't published anywhere you are unlikely to have any redress. It may be, in fact, that they interpreted your words as a statement that you didn't want your name associated with the work in any way. If that is the case it would have been unethical to ack you. But it is also unrealistic to suggest they abandon the work because you collaborated earlier, but not later.

I'll also guess that if you press it too hard it will put yourself in an unfavorable light. If you need to work with them in the future, it might be worth your smoothing the waters even if that is over generous in this case.

But in future, of course, you need to be clearer about the use of your work.

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Plagiarism