Hello,

My friend and I designed an novel circuit, which we are trying to get published. We did the design, got the simulation results and wrote the report to be published.

When we submitted the report to our professor to revise and make changes. What he did was, did the revision, redid layout of the circuit  and then placed his name as the first author, made me the second author and my friend the final author. This I think was totally unfair and uncalled for.

Throughout the whole circuit design, he did not help one bit. Now he is hogging all the credit. Whats worse is that he removed the acknowledgment section, in which we state that this was a part of our class project and we thanked the university.

So my main question is does it matter in IEEE Publication, whose name comes first? Also, if someone else sees the paper will he think we did less of the work? Thirdly, is there a way I can put in the paper that we contributed more than the professor.

I am really stuck. I do not want to ruin my chances with the professor because he is also my thesis advisor.

Any suggestions would be welcomed.

Regards

Hi tbc,

Many years ago, I came with a novel idea on frequency hopping systems and shared the idea with my boss who was very impressed with it. I wrote up a disclosure and sent it to my boss to forward it to the attorney. When the attorney sent me the patent application draft, I saw that the order of the names were changed - my boss became the first inventor (though he did not contribute at all to the idea). I was incensed, but decided to talk to him about this - he readily agreed to put my name first (i suspect not to make a big deal out of this as it would make him look bad).

My suggestion would be - be bold and talk to your professor on why you think you should be the first inventor. Offer to make him the first author if he does not think that you should be the first. You can do this politely and respectfully, and thank him profusely for his minor edits!!! (would be a useful skill to learn to deal with the parasitic types at work place)

Be cautious of course if your prof is the totally unreasonable type and keep copies of all emails, different versions of the papers etc (in case it came to an independent evaluation)

Thank You guys for your suggestions,

Yes I talked to the professor. He said that he put his name first because he wanted to be the corresponding author ( I guess that means that if IEEE wants to contact the people who wrote the paper, they will probably correspond to him ).

Is this true? Does the corresponding author need to be first or can we specify separately the person IEEE needs to be contacting. My friend and I do not have any experience in publishing the paper, so I think its best to make him the corresponding author.

Also, it was not his design. It was our design from scratch and like I said he did not help one bit.

Anyway best of luck to all the people who are facing such a problem.

See also http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/authors/publish/publish_.... The corresponding author does not have to be the first author. It is common practice to list the supervisor as last author (see http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/reprint/23/5/1283.pdf and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2247376/).