Responsibility for Work that Carries Your Name

You are a Master's candidate working on a research team with another Master's candidate, a Ph.D. candidate named Ambitious Striver, and their faculty supervisor. Striver is anxious to publish, and sends off several abstracts of papers for presentation at professional symposia. Before any of the symposia have occurred, however, Striver and the other Master's student both graduate.

You subsequently goes on to Doctoral study at another university. One day, looking at the proceedings of a symposium, you find that it contains a paper with your, Striver's, and the other two collaborators names on it -- a paper which you have never seen!

The paper has two parts. The first part represents some of their joint work and is only loosely related to the second part, which concerns a point of theory on which you were not involved. You are disquieted to be an author of a paper which you have not seen. Furthermore, you are concerned about being held responsible for the second half of the article, with which you are unfamiliar. Nonetheless, the conclusions in both parts of the paper seem respectable.

[Based on a scenario by Giovanni Flammia, a Computer Science graduate student.]

What, if anything, should you do?


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