Comment by de6u99er
4 years ago
>based on my understanding of how CS research groups usually function
If you mean supervisors adding their names on to publications without having contributed any work, than this is not only limited to CS research groups. Authorship misrepresentation is widespread in academia and unfortunately mostly being ignored. Those who speak up are being singled out and isolated instead.
I would say it's less authorship misrepresentation and more an established convention that's well-known to people within the field. Lead authors go first, then supporting contributors, and finally advisors at the end.
Even if they didn't write or perform part of the research, they did act in an advisory or consulting fashion, and therefore could significantly shape the research. Maybe there should be a different way to credit that, but right now convention is to put them in a low position in the list of authors.
Where I went, it was so widespread that it was considered normal and nobody would even think about speaking out about it. Only with hindsight did I realize how despicable it was.
At my last job a low quality paper was written about "my work" despite me saying that it's too early. It was based on my idea and resulted in our research groups grant participation being extended, despite our professor saying that the grant won't be extended since he switched universities and continent.
It was written while I was working on the software and my name was then put in third position on the list of authors. Only way I was able to defend myself was, asking them to remove my name from the paper which resulted in the paper not being published.