Crediting Trainees for Writing Grant Proposals
You are a Ph.D. student working with Professor Pi. You are near the completion of your project and have prepared a paper for publication. Professor Pi has hired another Ph.D. student, Kino, who will continue on the same project after you graduate. Professor Pi would like to renew his funding for that project and prepares a grant proposal with the help of Kino. Professor Pi has an electronic version of your paper and copies most of the figures and about half the text in the grant proposal from your paper. You have presented some of the work reported in your paper at a conference. That presentation is cited in the grant proposal, but only in the Background and Significance section. You are concerned that whoever will read that proposal may attribute to Kino all the work presented in the Progress Report section because Kino is the person for whom the funding is sought. You also worry that you will be submitting exactly the same figures and text when you publish your paper.
This scenario is substantially the same as that to be found at http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/16234.aspx for which Anila Jahangiri was the primary author.
What is the status of a grant proposal as a report of research?
Would the fairness issues be any different if the first student's work were the student's thesis rather than a (publishable) research paper reporting work that the first student had done as a research assistant, but not as thesis work?
Would the situation be different if the advisor had made a presentation of the lab's work to an industry group, rather than summarizing it in a proposal to a government funding agency?
What would be appropriate ways of crediting trainee contributor to a grant proposal? Would it be different if the trainee were listed as a member of the research team to be supported if the work is funded?
One faculty member, when writing a grant proposal that uses the work of a student who will not be getting any financial support from a grant, puts the name of the student in the Collaborators section (for whom no funding is sought). What is the range of acceptable variation among faculty members in the way they credit their trainee's work?
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