Supervisor published my thesis figures without including me as an author

Question

The supervisor for my PhD thesis has recently published a paper with another student. In this paper, the other student has replicated one of the chapters of my PhD thesis for publication.

For reference, after completing my PhD I moved into the public sector and did not publish my thesis work myself, due to concerns with the underlying methodology.

However, of the five figures in this new paper, two figures have been taken directly from my published thesis. This is very easy to prove, as some of the figures are photographs and are identical to the work published in my thesis. My thesis is available as a digital download online at the same research institution my supervisor currently works at.

I wasn't consulted regarding the publication or use of my research, and was not listed as an author on the new paper (or even in the acknowledgements). The figures they have published were produced solely by myself, without assistance from my supervisor or the other student.

This finding makes me question whether they did indeed repeat the initial experiment, or whether they instead used the leftover materials from my research (specifically, extracted RNA/cDNA) to re-run a handful of analyses and republish my thesis chapter without me.

I have contacted my supervisor by email for clarification, but my questions are:

• Is this academic misconduct and/or plagiarism?
• If so, what is the appropriate avenue to follow to correct/resolve/dispute this? (e.g. is it appropriate to contact the journal or my supervisor's university to report this? What are the first steps?)

Answer 1

is this academic misconduct?

That depends. Your thesis is published, just not in a journal. It’s published as part of your alma mater’s repository and anyone can access it, your advisor in particular. Regarding the figures: it really depends on how they did it. If they copied them without citing your thesis that’s pretty clear cut plagiarism which is wrong under any standard of academic publishing. If they cite you (saying something like figure taken from X), that should probably be okay. This is especially true if your advisor helped design and generate these figures (they’d be a coauthor of sorts). Again, you should be credited regardless, and if a citation is missing it should be noted. I’d be extremely surprised if your advisor wouldn’t be willing to cite you, my guess is that the student who wrote the paper forgot to (remember hanlon’s razor!).

what is the appropriate avenue to correct this?

You could first try and reach out to your former advisor. Ask them. Maybe there’s a simple misunderstanding here. If there’s a dispute the most direct course of action is reaching out to the department head, or vice dean of research and inform them. If you have contacts on the department (a trusted professor who’s sufficiently senior), might be good to hear their opinion on the matter.

Contacting the journal or anyone external should be a last resort I think. But if you feel like you’ve exhausted your options with the department and nobody’s listening, it may not be a bad idea. Again, expect a laconic response: some journal editor will be extremely hesitant in dealing with such cases, especially since the paper is out.

Good luck!

EDIT: I missed this part

the other student has replicated one of the chapters of my PhD thesis

That is unacceptable plagiarism even with citation. Lifting entire chapters (even paragraphs) is never okay. The figures are a much more minor issue. Start with that!