Tiia and friends, I'm on this thread to learn 'what to do'. In the last paper that I published, my co author was Enzo Ierardi, who is a perfect gentleman.  Now  I have several projects on RG, and I have reason to be happy and thankful.  The project feature is open, everything is now in the open.  The contributions of each person can be spelled out.  MEMBERS CAN EVALUATE THE CONTRIBUTION OF EACH PERSON.  THOSE WHO PROVIDE INTELLECTUAL CONTRIBUTION REALLY FULFILL THEIR ROLES.  THANKS TO RG FOR THE PROJECT FEATURE.

Once I had a problem: a PhD student contacted me and wished to write a paper together with me and his supervisor (a well-known professor). I worked a lot on that paper, but later discovered that he had published this paper together with his professor without mentioning my name at all. As I had only been in contact with the student, I could not do much as I did not know if the professor knew anything about this or not. I informed his professor, but the student had graduated by that time, so, in principle, nothing happened. Now my principle is to be in contact with all co-authors and keep all e-mails until the paper gets published to prove my role in writing the paper.

Thanks Tiia. I'm collaborating on a research, I hope that it will be OK. I'm very transparent and hope others are equally honest. But on RG, I have come across unethical and anonymous people, so I keep working hard and praying hard.

A long time ago, my co author send me her part which I checked using Google scholar and found many of the sentences were taken from the works of others. To my horror, she did not cite many of the original sentences and phrases taken from the works of others. I rewrote the paragraphs with proper citations. I did not confront the person on this nor did i make a fuss about it with the other colleagues for the reason i did not want this to turn personal. That was the last time I co write with the person and the incident cautioned me to be more careful. Now with Turnitin checking is even easier.

So far, I can only say wonders about my Co-author. She has helped me a lot and thanks to her we can let our work be seen by some of the great names in tourism studies. This is a very personal question but in terms of my little experience in research I can only say positive things about my co-author.

I have to add, my other co writers were great and contribute positively to the papers.

When I was inexperienced, one of my co-authors (a lecturer) wanted his name included in a paper, not making any active contribution at all. He just had to review my paper before I submit - I did not include him as co-author.

Dear Tiia, I had such bad practice! In such cases, I do stop cooperation!

I wonder why this downvoting taking place here! This is not fair! Not at all! Let's see if I am next candidate for downvoting!!! Miranda and Tiia are victims of non-ethical treat!

Ljubomir, I just upvoted you and Miranda.

I never had a bad experience with coauthors. In an encyclopedic work where there were four co-authors, one co-author did nothing, and another twice as much. But since the lazy co-author had made a good name for himself, I did not object to his being on the list of authors.

In fact, none of the co-authors tried to deceive me, and this is because I make sure that the co-author is of good reputation.

Dear All, Lijo Francis, Patrick Low and others that you know are not able any longer to log in their RG account from yesterday. RG suspended their accounts without any reason. I don't know why, but I find this an outstanding abuse. Please help them and inform all other participants as this is a signal that things are not going in the right way in RG before it happens to you!

Regards

Gianni

@Prof Kamal and friends, how sad, but it happens. So I'm just being very careful that it's not going to repeat.

It did not happen but in our all research collaboration, we do agree in a Research agreement / MoU (signed by the collaborating researchers or institutes) who will be in the research team, how the intellectual property will be shared between/ among institutions collaborating (equally or otherwise), how the authorships will appear in a peer reviewed technical reports or journal paper (such as who will be main author and who will be the 2nd, 3rd or 4th authors). So the agreement or MoU helps a lot and there is no chance for any misunderstanding since from the beginning everyone in the team agrees and knows their role and responsibilities and authorships. Since the agreement/MoU is a legal document so it prevents any conflict among authors that might happen at a later stage!

Dear Tiia, It never happened to me. In fact co-authorship is like first love and one should be very careful in having a joint publication.

I like this questions. In our research I believe in work with collaboration and work with

co-author.  But if someone publishes our joint paper without mentioning my name.  I will tell him juste " Thank you for your help ".

I work a new problem and I will find good co-author, I publish this work and I will sent

him this paper with this word " Thank you for your help ".

I stay send him any new publishing with " Thank you for your help "........this is my philosophie

Dear Tiia, Profs and all, I have one more new collaboration on RG.  I wrote the paper, prepared the tables and the figure.  I believe I can trust the other person, but if s/he really wants to betray the trust, what can we do?  Does having a DOI give some kind of 'protection'?  Dear friends, what is your view about what degree of good a DOI gives?

Dear @Miranda, I have generated my DOI's! Here are a good readings about!

https://www.datacite.org/news/cooperation-between-datacite-and-researchgate.html

http://datapub.cdlib.org/tag/doi/

http://www.itc.nl/Pub/Home/library/Processing-information/ResearchGate.html

http://blog.impactstory.org/researchgate-doi/

You can protect yourself if you publish the co-authored paper or at least send it to a conference (then, people will see your name on, too) or, at least, if you do not trust your co-author, then do not delete any e-mails you sent or received as these will prove that you worked on the paper.

Dear Tiia Vissak

Fortunately so far all my co-authors co-operated wonderfully and we had no problems at all not only in publishing but also deciding the author's position/order in the manuscript. Many times I gave my juniors first or senior authorship and they were elated. What a pleasure to see your juniors bloom into full fledged researchers and mentors.

I would like to congratulate and thank all my co-authors through this forum for their excellent conduct, co-operation and contributions.

Best wishes.

Dear Tiia, I am so happy that my co author proved to be trustworthy, and I have a few more collaborations now.  But I'm struggling with time and fulfilling my responsibilities.  Thanks for this question, and the wonderful answers I read.  (I still try to place a few posts that I think fit on Q and A, and have some fun.)

Policy for Authorship on Scientific and Scholarly Publications is an example of fine document. It may be a role model for those institutions which do not have it yet. The existence and application of such policy may prevent deception!

http://wustl.edu/policies/authorship.html

Dear Dr. Tiia Vissak, 

I never had such a bad experience during my very short research period. But I have heard a lot about such things from my co-researchers. Co-authors should be genuine co-operative among themselves. They should never cheat each other.  Your works can be uploaded to certain preprint services like arXiv or Citeseer X so as to ensure that your works will not be stolen and your contributions will be recognised.

Dear Tia,

I hope nobody has deceived you. You look so young and pretty, and you do not deserve it!

Anyway, it is not possible nowadays to be a lonely runner. We work with people and for the people. And  it is possible to be betrayed (as it often happens in the real life, outside the laboratories and universities). It is difficult to choose who to trust.

I think some open platforms such as RG are very useful to present one's researches at different stages of development, and to find reliable collaborators.

Perhaps, some new indexes and evaluations can be introduced;) - e.g. reliability, responsiibility, etc. And if one feels deceived, he/she could warn the others.

My best regards!

I was deceived once: a co-author published our joint paper without my name on it but added another person as a co-author. As I did not know if that other person knew anything about my role, I could not do much.

Dear Tia,

I am really sorry about that. But it does not mean that your next co-authors will deceive you again. You should not give up science.

I beleive in human virtues. I mean, being good with people, making them feel O.K. - it makes happy. And you can trust me - betrayers are not happy.

Just go on and follow your path :)

My best wishes!

 Commenting about the statement of Dr. Nadezhda Filipova (betrayers are not happy): I lost count of how many times I have been betrayed in many things including research. Many new ideas originated from me, were picked by others, and then the others claimed that they were the "innovators". A clever colleague of mine, who noticed that, told me: You have been the "unknown soldier in the university" ! I just replied: Yes. I really do not care about the unhappy betrayers who are living a very big lie.

I have no experience when my coauthors have stolen my ideas. Usually I choose honest collaborators. Also  it is typically either vertical collaboration (with my student or with my boss), or symmetric collaboration with a researcher who has complementary skills. But the case that Tiia described in one of her first answers about one Ph.D student with two professors in dangerous indeed.

Stealing of ideas indeed may take place, especially in social sciences. But it is often indirect. For example, a good paper with new ideas can be rejected without good reasons, and then some of those ideas appear in different paper but in a format with other assumptions, so that no plagiarism can be detected.

If it does happen, write a letter to the publisher (to explain the reasons), and ask to withdraw the paper. Especially, when the paper contains falsified data (as you said). Otherwise, the paper is going to ruin your career sooner or later.

Unfortunately, similar to Mr ALi B,  It was happened for me in the first article I had worked with major role in that research (at least 60 percent contribution) without know about it till the article was published. 

Thank you very much for present this question. 

Hello again Tiia.  My collaboration with Enzo on a recent paper shows how important co authors are.  At first, there was another person who agreed to be the corresponding author.  He said he was willing to pay.  But for some reason or other, he kept silent completely when I had sent all the sections of the manuscript to him.  I was mystified.  It was he who had initiated chats on Hangouts, so when he did not reply to my question if he had sent the article to the journal, I knew that I would have to do it myself.  I will be more careful in future.  This was the collaboration effort.

My sympathies to all who feel that they were short-changed.  Let's get on with our research ad writing.  May this new year be a better one for us all.

Article Motivation and Achievement of Malaysian Students in Studying...

To deceive a colleague/co-author is very serious academic fraud. As I have experienced it before, I had simply quitted collaboration.

Nowadays, if such thing would happen to me, I would report it to COPE!

http://publicationethics.org/

Dear Ljubomir, I wonder how much difference it would make to report such things formally.  As long as the paper isn't taken as their possession, I would still acknowledge the 'support' of such people.  It's because I am not sure what caused the change in the mindset of that particular person who seemed so collaborative and helpful, at first.  Thanks for your understanding, and thanks to Enzo too, for not doubting me.

I have had such experience.

It was easy. Just keep all the documents, chats, etc. with your collaborators. When such things happen, send the documents to journal’s editor-in- chief and ask her/him to retract the paper. She/he has to do it, if your documents will be enough and you could convince her/him.

Often it is more a misunderstanding than a scam. However difficult situations arise :-)

Therefore I hardly understand articles, where there are three (or more) the authors - excluding multi-page bye to the books.

It is simple - we must to pick a good co-authors.

Trust must never be betrayed. It is given in confidence and guarded with loyalty. When trust is lost, Something fine and beautiful dies!!

regards

Rathish

No not at all. One should not include such coauthors if at all any !. The work to be published should always be collective effort of the people involved. At the same time there in no fun in involving more than three authors, unless it is a real field work involving several people. Otherwise, famous adage goes " Too many cooks spoil the Broth"

Yes. The perfection does not exist in the common people, and I am not perfect too. But I have this intention of perfection which is not usual.

Duplicate publication by the co-authors (different co-authors) is fine example of deceiving. 

What a strange experience!

http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/71854/duplicate-publication-by-the-co-authors

Actually it didn't happen with me, since i am the one in our team who takes care of the literature review and prepares the report and interact with the journal about publication and all. So i don't think if a person does these things then anybody can deceive him. 

1. @  Ljubomir, that was a good example of co-author deceiving. I went to the website, after 4 authors published the manuscript in journal A, two of the authors (+ a new author) re-published it on another journal B, with 70% similarity. Although the two journals are local and not reputable, this is fraudulent.

2. Except co-author deceiving, I am more worried about co-workers' lab sabotage, where they destroy other people's research before they can even reach publication.

See the website below (with a video). It has been a very big news in the US. The story was even published on the journal Nature. From the website, you can read the story, and watch a security camera catching a post-doc who tried to sabotage another researcher's cancer research work.

[ http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/04/lab_sabotage_deemed_research_m_1.html ]

He was caught red-handed and was sent to court.

Dear Tiia,

It is less possible to be deceived for a neighbour than for an extranger. Best wishes.

Dear Dr. Tiia Vissak,

I never experienced such feelings and I never overheard about such feelings among my coauthors. 

In my view if role, and obligation is clearly understood and contributions and acknowledgement is are demarcated, then there will be less chance of having such unnecessary burning feelings among coauthors.

Its very rare. Authors are usually matured and responsible.

Professor forced to retire after threatening co-author!

http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/01/professor-forced-to-retire-after-threatening-co-author/

Yes, this happened when the students of one of the publishing houses of my colleague agreed to publish the books. It was supposed to be my name first and then his name, but he told me that the company worked. I do not know how to make it and I know that he gave his name.

Yes they have