How to best address authorship issues with PI?

Question

I am a postdoc working with the same supervisor who supervised my PhD thesis. During my PhD time, it was tacitly assumed that my work is his work too. It went as far as me doing the entire planning and execution of a paper and writing the first draft, while he later looked over the draft and made suggestions on what to expand and what to change. None of the suggestions were fleshed out. Yet we are the only two authors on this paper and he wrote in the author contributions footnote that he and I both conceived of the study, I did the experiments, and both wrote the paper. Since the paper used some of his data as well as experiments funded by a grant given to him, I obviously cannot publish anything on my own.

However, now, in my postdoc function at the same institution, I find myself in a situation where a PhD student and I are doing a lot of work for a paper and there are two professors involved. My advisor and another professor. The current paper grew out of another study for which I did all the experiments and coding with a lot of input from the other professor (not my advisor), while the advisor wrote the first draft. My advisor ended up as the first author, even though only the initial idea of working on the topic was his, but he barely contributed to the design of the study, nor does he understand the statistics used or the experimental design. In this follow-up paper it is, once more, tacitly understood that my advisor will be first author and the other professor the senior author. The work, meanwhile, is done by the PhD student and me with some input and supervision from the other professor.

Is it possible to somehow broach this inequality in my/our position without destroying one's future?

Additionally, I'm getting more and more messages that sound like I'll be part of more papers where I'm clearly the only person doing all the work. Is it normal to have the lab leader as a senior author even though he doesn't contribute any work, nor any meaningful feedback (simply because the methods are not accessible to him)? And also I've been getting signals that sound like if I publish my own work, not using the data gathered at work, I'd still have to run it by my PI, and possibly have him as a co-author. This last part is particularly disturbing. Has anyone ever been in a similar situation? How do you discuss these things?

Answer 1

Your supervisor's conduct is blatantly unethical. The current relationship is harming your career. You need to find a new job.

Answer 2

I agree that having the professor as the first author seems wildly inappropriate. However, this can sometimes be the case in countries with labs that have a "lab head" and many young faculty underneath them. As many countries and schools only consider papers on which faculty are first or corresponding author in advancement and evaluation, it sets up perverse incentives for faculty to insist on first or corresponding authorship where it isn't deserved by most journals' ethical standards. If this is the case and is likely to remain so, then I agree with SolarMike's comments to find a new position if possible.

You don't say in your question what your relationship is like with the main advisor. Could you discuss this situation with them directly? If so, I would take a some time to cool off and make sure you aren't as dismissive of their contributions as you are in your question. Rather acknowledge their advising and support, but suggest that you and the PhD student be the co-first authors, while the professor and the other advisor be the co-corresponding authors. This would be the way we would untangle this Gordian knot in my institution.

Regarding including senior authors who may be distant from the day-to-day of running the experiments (but still qualify for authorship due to setting the directions, securing lab funding, etc.), this depends strongly on the customs in your field. Some fields go alphabetically, some have the "advisor" as the 2nd author, others the advisor is as the last author. However, the advisor is typically always included, even if their contributions were minor. Don't forget their funds paid your salary and the PhD students, got the equipment and whatnot for the lab, and other things without which the research would have remained an idea on a drawing board.

Regarding publishing papers entirely on your own, again this may be field and country-dependent, but I personally don't see anything "disturbing" about the advisor insisting on looking it over. This is standard practice in industry, for example, and your contract with the university may even say something to this effect. All of your intellectual output, even that created "on the side", typically belongs to the employer, who, at their discretion may choose whether or not to exercise their right to ownership if it's truly outside the bounds of your normal duties. As a post-doc you're not hired on a 9-to-5 basis, and as the bulk of the work is intellectual, there's no easy way to disentangle what ideas were developed "on the clock" versus developed on your own time.