1) Put National Lab as your affiliation with a current address at Prodigal U?
2) Put both National Lab and Prodigal U as affiliations?
3) Put Prodigal U as your affiliation?
My colleagues at National Lab say I should do what is best for me careerwise, and don't worry about it too much. I would prefer to do #3, but I think that is misleading. I am leaning towards #2, since I did a bunch of the work at Prodigal U, but I suspect #1 is probably the proper thing to do (since all of the data originated there). Opinions?
Updated to add: I should also add that it is not uncommon for Fed scientists who move on to use only their new affiliations, since many Fed labs have irritating and/or lengthy internal review and release approval requirements. This can be reduced by minimizing the Federal affiliations of the authors (and thus the number of required approvals).
9 comments:
Best for your career is #3 -- goes on your record as one of your Prodigal U pubs as opposed a tail from the previous position.
#2 has the benfit of being unquestionably accurate. But if #2 this means lengthy approvals (on TT, you cannot afford to lose time with pubs, so any delay is bad) and your National Lab folks won't be upset if you don't put the Lab's affiliation, I would say it's OK to go with #3.
I'd say #2. It's accurate, as GMP mentioned....but it's also fair, and no one can question you. I think along these lines. But what do I know, I am a postdoc not even halfway done.
I say #3. National Lab doesn't care, and I'm not sure that the data would mean anything if you hadn't been at ProdigalU. Also, it works out better for you. I think that the "right" answer is a little ambiguous, but if Nat. Lab is on board, then go for it.
I would say 3, with a footnote (or a sentence in the Acknowledgements section) that research for this paper was done in period 20XX-20YY when you were working at the National Lab. This is what I did when I moved from PhD country to my current university.
For me, clearly #2 because it is accurate. No reason to be misleading in the affiliation. To me, it would even reflect badly on the content of the paper.
Since the data orginated at National Lab, don't you still have to go through the approval/release process anyway, regardless of how you list your affiliation? Or, in choosing #3, would you be pretending you took the data at Prodigal U? This would make me uncomfortable -- I tend to think like Venkat. But then again, what do we non-faculty know....
#2 is the way to go. Since the work was funded and performed at National Lab, it needs to be included.
What Pika said - #3 with footnote. Unless you're still working for National Lab / consulting there, I would definitely put Prodigal U as your affiliation.
After finishing up the manuscript, it turns out that I will have a co-author from National Lab, so the paper will have to be approved by them anyway. Although I would like to choose option #3 (which would be best for my career), I also want to give proper credit where it is due. I like the suggestion by Pika and FCS, but I have never seen such a thing in my field. Thus, I will go with option #2 (which I have seen). I feel this more accurately reflects the situation than the other choices.
This was very helpful to me in thinking through the choices--thanks blog readers!
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