Forum:How can I deal with this publication issue?

Question

[Gene-ticks]

I was a graduate student at one of the universities in the US about two years ago and I was working on a thesis. I was an international student and my advisory committee thought that my writing skills were extremely poor and I was asked to quit the program (though I didn't agree with their decision). I had done some literature review during the program and I recently decided to submit that as a review paper in a fairly decent journal. I just got the decision from the editor saying that the paper could be accepted with minor revision.

Now, I would like your opinion on whether I should contact my advisory committee to see if they would be willing to be the co-authors on the paper. Since I worked on this manuscript while I was a graduate student at that university and did get some help with the corrections on my writing (especially grammar; and I did not use any data from any of my supervisors), do you think I am liable for including them as co-authors on the paper? Do I need to include my previous university as my affiliation and my supervisors as co-authors in this case? Should I contact them and offer them for co-authorship? What if they decline or would not respond? Since I spent good amount of time and worked really hard on this manuscript, I would like to get this published. I would really appreciate if I could have your opinion on what I should be doing at this point to avoid any infraction of Intellectual property agreement. Thanks!

[Emily]

Who told you your writing skills were poor? I can see two clearly written paragraphs right there.

[h.mon]

I moved your post to the Forum section, as it is more appropriate there.

I think you will get a lot more advice from Academia StackExchange. However, if you decide to post there, tell us (and them) about the cross-posting, and explain there you cross-posted following the advice of some nice dude at the other forum.

edit: in fact, I forgot to link a somewhat related post from Academia StackExchange: Should one thank colleagues for interesting discussions that have not actually achieved anything?. There is a good number of similar posts. Don't forget to say in which country you studied, as qualification committees have very different degrees of involvement from place to place.

[rbagnall]

Not really the right place for this question.

It's best to sort this out way before submission. When you submitted the review, who did you list as authors, and which institution did you list as your affiliation?

[Gene-ticks]

I and one my colleagues who helped me later to finish the paper are listed as authors. I have my old university as my affiliation right now.

[Gene-ticks]

I believe the affiliation can be changed to my current work.

Answer 1

[Devon Ryan]

If your advisory committee didn't provide intellectual input on this particular paper then they don't need to be offered credit. If you had some discussions with them that clarified topics and that ended up aiding in drafting the manuscript then you can certainly offer coauthorship to them, though I expect they'll reply with something along the lines of "not necessary, but thanks." Note that if you were receiving funding from a particular lab during the time in which you wrote this then the PI there should also be offered coauthorship.

Regarding your affiliation, generally you list the affiliation you had while writing the manuscript. So if you started on it while at your old institute then you can keep that and either add your current one too or add that under a *.

As h.mon aptly noted, it's best to get issues of authorship out of the way before you submit, though.