by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-05-14 14:26:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I asked this question on academia.stackexchange.com and got some answers. I'm curious to hear what the HN community thinks, too.

Here's the text of my academia.stackexchange.com post:

A paper authored by myself during my post-doc was submitted to conference A and rejected. I was unhappy with the paper and did not want to resubmit it to another conference. It was agreed with my PI that two new papers would be written, one incorporating the theoretical results, and one the empirical results, from the original paper, but otherwise both papers would be re-written from scratch.

I was most interested in publishing the theoretical results so I went to work on the paper that would incorporate them, in collaboration with PhD student X. I will call this the "theoretical paper". PhD student Y volunteered to work on the paper with the empirical results. I will call this the "experimental paper". Both papers got accepted by the reviewers in Conference B. When I looked at the experimental paper it was an almost verbatim copy of the original paper, with the name of PhD student Y as the first author. They were kind to add me as a second author. They had changed maybe six or seven words in the Introduction section, messed up the copy (they left some LaTex packages out so the special symbols in the framework section didn't display) but otherwise simply copy/pasted the original paper into Overleaf and put their name on top.

I sent a polite email to inform my PI and PhDs of what had happened. I explained that we were now essentially self-plagiarising because we had two papers sharing substantial portions of their text (the theoretical section from the original paper was now in both the theoretical and experimental paper). I did not want to accuse PhD student Y of more outright plagiarism for copying and submitting my work without my consent, so I left that part out, hoping that it would all be sorted anyway. I recommended that the experimental paper be retracted, since it was not submitted in accordance with what we had agreed.

My PI asked me to a meeting where he argued there was no problem with the experimental paper, that it was not self-plagiarism if both papers were published in the same conference, and that if the paper was retracted it would reflect badly on me as a post-doc. I pointed out the more serious problem of plagiarism and insisted that the paper should be withdrawn because it was authored by me, but submitted without my consent and with a different first author.

The PI disagreed and instead asked the other post-doc in the project to write a brand new paper and submit that as the camera-ready version of the experimental paper, in place of the paper that had passed review. The editorial team of Conference B was not informed of this.

I have raised the issue with the Program Chair of Conference B and the final decision is that the PI will write a cover letter explaining the situation to reviewers and the camera-ready version will be sent to them again for approval.

My question for the board: is any of this research misconduct? Was I right to complain about plagiarism? Are my PI's actions reasonable?

Was I right to raise the issue with the Program chair, or have I made a mountain out of a molehill?

The PI is an influential leader in my very small field and my actions will most likely cause me to be ostracized by my community. Was that all for nothing? Did I just over-react and destroy my own chances at an academic career for an imaginary offense?

Was there really academic misconduct here or was it all in my big, fat head?