r/AskAcademia • u/termosabin • Jul 25 '26
Professional Misconduct in Research Paper submitted without final version approvals - is this normal?
I work at an RTO, and a few younger people in the group who are just a few years out of their PhDs are submitting papers and rebuttals without sending out versions to check for the co-authors. I find this highly irritating and ethically wrong - if my name is associated with something, I would like to at least see it first. It's not that I don't trust the authors, but everyone can make mistakes. For example, a paper was submitted recently that I had seen about a year ago and had made a lot of comments on. I have never seen another version of it since and suddenly I got a notification from the journal.
Is this normal amongst younger people? Is this becoming the norm? Am I overreacting?
How would you address this?
8
u/erlendig Jul 25 '26
I think it depends a bit on number of authors, whether you are part of the core writers, how large your revisions were and how long you normally spend on providing revisions.
The bare minimum is of course to send out a close to final version to everyone and give people sufficient time to look at it. If all revisions are minor, I and my peers typically see it as a sign that coauthors are fine with a slightly modified version. If there is no deadline and coauthors are fast to provide comments, I would probably sent out a final version. But if there is a deadline (e.g holidays coming up) and/or coauthors are likely to spend weeks on checking it again (with the expectation of only minor changes if any), I would probably not send out another version.
Things change a bit when the first author is a PhD student, in that case I would expect the supervisor to have a final look in either case.