Giving Techs Credit

[Linnea Ista]

On Sun, 7 Sep 1997 kathleen at idt.net wrote:

> 
> A recent thread made reference to (but didn't really deal
> with) several aspects of technicians working in research
> positions.  I'm interested in this on behalf of my sister
> who is a nurse and worked for years on drug-company sponsored
> research at a NY hospital.  An article on the research
> was just published and she was not given credit in the
> publication.  Do technicians normally get credit?  Are there
> established procedures for correcting this?  Should she
> write to the journal (J of Bone & Joint Surgery)?
> I would appreciate any direction you can provide.
I have heard that MD's in particular are loathe to put techs in. I had a
friend who did the majority of the work on a project assigned to the
acknowledgements because the first author did not want a "mere" BS listed
among all the MD's. On the other hand, up until recently I was classified
as a tech, and I was first author on a paper for which I had done the
majority of the work ( and wrote the paper). I am in a chemical
engineering department. I would say in general that most science labs give
credit where it is due, especially if someone has contributed major
technical and/or intellectual input into the project.

Linnea