Quote:
Originally Posted by LabRat27
It could be a tricky situation. Obviously the politics within a research group (or between research groups) aren't your responsibility to manage, but I would assume that the friend is one of several authors. While everyone who has authorship on a paper has certain ethical responsibilities, in practice it's complicated.
Idk how much of this you already know, it sounds like you're pretty familiar with academia? So I might be telling you stuff you already know.
Idk the field that this paper is in or what the norms are, but like in my field I could be an author on a paper because I handled one part of the work but not have had anything to do with other parts, and in terms of authority and influence it could be tricky and delicate to try to tell a more senior researcher that there was an issue with part of their paper that was their responsibility.
The concern might be heard more effectively if taken directly to the person who's considered to have the most general/overall responsibility and control, either the corresponding author or the first author
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Thanks so much for this thorough, helpful post--I'm pretty familiar with academia, but it's really useful to have this reminder of how different the norms can be in different fields, since this researcher is in a very different discipline than mine and the politics of this particular research team aren't familiar to me.
I think I've been able to get the information where it needs to go through the channels available to me--it seems like my coworker's friend is in fact the person who (should have) handled the minutiae of making sure the subjects' details were properly disguised, in addition to being the lead author. Now I'm crossing my fingers waiting to hear back, and hoping the information is taken seriously and in the spirit with which it was given.
In my field, this kind of privacy breach would basically be considered an emergency. Heck, if it were my paper and someone contacted me concerned that they'd IDed a human subject, I'd change the details even if I knew they couldn't possibly be correct. Let alone if there were any chance at all that they were right.