Citation

Abu-Zaid A. Educ. Health Change Learn. Pract. 2020; 33(2): 79-80.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Network of Community-Oriented Educational Institutions for Health Sciences, Publisher Network Towards Unity for Health)

DOI

10.4103/efh.EfH_95_20

PMID

33318460

Abstract

I enrolled in a medical school to pursue a career as a physician. However, during the 3rd year of medical school, this career route changed when I undertook five self-led extracurricular research activities and communicated their findings in indexed journals. The inquiry-driven learning, the notion of exploring the unknown, and the opportunity to uncover new knowledge - as seen in research - have always been a source of delight and rewarding challenge. Since then, I have been strongly interested in a prospective research-focused academic medicine career. Research scholarship, gauged by the excellence of scientific publications, is instrumental to a future academic medicine career.[1] To that end, I sought my first research partnership with a "senior" faculty (the mentor) as a wise footstep to enhance the quality and accelerate the quantity of my pool of scholarly publications.

Regrettably, my first research partnership harbored a plethora of an unethical exercise of a severe form of research bullying, i.e., authorship abuse and publication parasitism.[2] To elaborate, the mentor employed unfairly his academic seniority to coerce the inclusion of his peers as coauthors despite their "zero" intellectual contribution, i.e., gift authorship. In one instance, the mentor omitted my name and took exclusive credit for an editorial manuscript contributed primarily by me, i.e., denial of authorship. Not to mention the countless occurrences that I experienced: conflict, macroaggression, and derogatory undermining of my research contributions. My junior research status was a vulnerable victim to his seniority standing; I was defenseless and could not voice myself. This matter was further compounded by the anxiety of adulterating the medical school's standing, the fear from an intensified backlash revenge, and importantly the lack of an institutional-based office to properly handle such research bullying matters. Disappointingly, my passion for an academic medicine career shrank as I failed to enrich my interest with fruitful research experiences and my résumé with rewarding indexed publications. Besides, my perception of research partnership with senior faculty changed negatively.

The bottom line, medical students continuously admire engagement in research endeavors with faculty of "seniority." However, not much is known about authorship abuse in such student-faculty research collaborations. The body of existing literature is scarce on this topic...

Language: en