I’m on a medium-sized project that has three graduate students working on it. I am the most senior graduate student, and am further along than the other two. Our university requires us to write dissertation proposals that highlight our plan for our dissertations. Barring anything unexpected, these proposals become the foundation of our dissertations and direct our academic work.
One of the other graduate students has been slowly taking my ideas, culminating in presenting parts of my research and dissertation plan outline as their own. I’ve talked with our advisor about this issue, and they originally had us discuss our chapters and how they relate to deliverables, and that seemed to fix it. Until this week, where I’ve now seen the student’s proposal, and they took my research questions for one of my chapters nearly word for word. My PI witnessed it and didn’t say anything, and potentially even encouraged the student to adjust the research questions to match mine. What should I do? If the student pursues these questions our research will be identical, as we are working with the same dataset, so there isn’t a way to spin this in another way. Any advice?
ETA: I have set up a time to meet with our dept. head and our ombuds to discuss next steps. Thanks everyone for your feedback – it was really validating to hear that this is pretty odd behavior for a PI and that it isn’t right.
Comments
If you feel you have evidence, tell your advisor you are not happy and you are going to the next level of oversight. It sounds very wrong and your advisor should not allow this to happen. Gather your materials and go to the next level. This is an academic honesty question.
This came up for one of my students, except the copy cat was under a different prof. I made a fuss. Her professor didn’t intervene. I talked with our dean. She’s on a different topic now. I don’t know if it was my complaining that motivated her to change.
It’s so easy to come up with research questions, so it seems very lazy and stupid to copy pasta.
You’re more senior right? Do it first. Publish and graduate. This sounds more embarrassing for the other student and the PI than anything else, especially if you get your work out first
This is why graduate study should each have distinct projects.
Why are you all studying the same thing
Well there isn’t enough information in here to figure out what’s actually going on but it would be a huge waste of the advisor’s time and funding to put several people on a project and them have two or more doing the exact same thing. So as stated, the situation sounds really nonsensical. But I think personally if I was assigned to do the exact same thing as someone else, or vice-versa, I’d talk to the head of my department.
This happened to me in a humanities discipline, but I never did anything about it (regrettably). We also both had the same advisor, too. I had several people tell me that I should have reported it to academic affairs. Luckily, I have a long track record of working on that particular topic. So, I’m just trying to do what another redditor said— publish my work before they can (I also defended before they did), so that’s probably the best advice if you don’t want to rock the boat. I’m sympathetic to that because it’s difficult to raise these kinds of issues when there’s various power relations involved and you don’t want everything to backfire on you somehow.
I am watching something similar unfold at my institution. The copycat student is … a problem, and even though everyone knows it, I don’t think the faculty know what to do or how to handle it. No one wants to be responsible for her. They want her to graduate and be gone via the path of least resistance. So I agree with what others have said…Stay focused, don’t get sidetracked in the nonsense, tell the other student you’re too busy to help them, finish your projects first, and gtfo.
Gather as much evidence as you can, and please stay away from writing groups or “accountability partners.” During my PhD program, these groups were notorious for sharing ideas and then mysteriously ideas would get shared and then the original author would have to co-author a conference or do something so that those where the ideas were shared and reframed had equal authorship rights because they “made the sharer’s ideas better.” Unfortunately, professors loved this stuff because they too would benefit from their students presenting at conferences. As you might tell from my post, I was the outcast, antisocial, wierd graduate student that kept to myself, but of course, in protecting my work I was able to publish a better thesis and award winning papers. I would have a conversation with your advisor (I did) and share that you have qualms about these issues happening and would like your scholarship to only be between them and you. If they see you are protecting your work and them, they will work with you. Otherwise, their incentive will be to protect the saavy graduate student that will steal and share the work because they want a piece of the cake in advising you and eat it too which is why they advise you (for pubs and conferences). STAY AWAY FROM WRITING GROUPS!
Looking at it from another perspective: are you being outcompeted to get your research actually done? Is your PI softly having another student take over your projects because you’re being too slow?
Agreed the situation seems badly mishandled, and communication from the PI seems poor. But in most groups it would be hard for another student to copy ideas, because the older students complete them more quickly than they could be copied.
Not sure if you will get to see my comment on another reply…Your PI may be allowing this to happen because they feel you are not moving fast enough or incapable, not saying these things are true. You can always go to your department chair if you have expressed your concerns directly to your PI. Do not sugarcoat anything. Intellectual propriety is a real thing, have evidence that you proposed the research question, study design etc
Kind of a joke answer, but you (being more Sr) will submit your dissertation first 😉