18 - Publication of Student Data When the Student Cannot Be Contacted

Summary

A colleague of mine once lost a graduate student. No goodbye note, no forwarding address, no response to repeated e-mail messages, phone calls, or letters. Not even the power of Google could locate this student. So what was my colleague to do with his student’s project? Could he publish it? Could he correctly interpret the results or vouch for their validity? He didn’t even know for sure if he had the final version of all the data. In the end he did nothing. So all of the work that the student put into the project, and all the work that my colleague put in, was effectively wasted.

Since that episode, I have come across several similar but less dramatic examples, and I have also experienced something similar myself. The most common scenario is that a student remains in touch with the supervisor for a period of time after graduation but fails to write up his or her data. Then at some point the supervisor discovers that the student can no longer be contacted. The ethical dilemma of course is whether the supervisor can take over and write up the student’s data for publication. On the one hand, it seems unethical for the supervisor to share credit for work done by another individual, and in particular to proceed with publication without the input and approval of that individual. On the other hand, it seems unethical to allow good research, often funded by the taxpayer, to remain unpublished. Not only that, but the supervisor has usually made a substantial contribution to the project that cannot be rewarded through publication.