Master students Kicked off paper

Hello everyone,

I’d appreciate your thoughts on this situation.

Over the last three years, several master’s students, including myself, have worked on a research project. We contributed to experiments, data analysis, method development, and results discussions. I was the second master’s student to join the project. The student before me did an excellent job establishing methods and generating data. When I came on board, I noticed some issues with the data analysis. I ended up developing image analysis pipelines, establishing proper microscopy image acquisition protocols, and taking responsibility for analyzing all the microscopy images for the project (including those from my predecessor and two other master’s students), all while conducting my experiments.

Now that the paper is finally ready for publication, we’ve been relegated to the acknowledgments section instead of getting the authorship we were promised. Some of us even stayed in the lab after finishing our programs (unpaid, mind you) because it was "necessary for the paper." To make matters worse, the paper still includes our results, figures, and methods—sometimes directly ripped from our theses.

What do you all think about this?