17 October 2006

The value of looking at the final draft when you are a distant 2nd author

Without lifting a finger, I got a new paper published this month in an engineering journal based on the research of me and another former grad student at my old department. The paper is just recycled stuff based on a conference paper I wrote a year and a half ago. In turn, that conference paper was just what I could scrape together from the stuff that wasn't heavily featured in the papers that me and the other grad student were already in the process of publishing. My prof, it seems, just got around to publishing this paper a little while ago without telling me or the other grad student that he was doing it. I just found out about it the other day when my prof emailed me about doing another conference paper (ASIDE: turns out he's unable to provide funding for me to go to the conference nor provide financial compensation of any sort, so there's no way in hell I'm busting my butt for a month to write that).

The problem arises in that my prof didn't ask me to review the paper before it was published. Now, I trust him when it comes to the data and discussions because he was a very hands-on supervisor and understands everything I did at least as well as I do. But there are some things that he just doesn't know. For instance, in the author contact information, he decided to enter my information for me, since he knows where I am and what engineering firm I work for. Problem is, he got confused, and instead of giving my company's address, he gave my real home address. So now, whoever goes to the journal website and views the paper's abstract can come drop by my crappy apartment. Fanfrickintastic.

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