So I was a research assistant at a lab at my university for about a year while I was an undergraduate student right up until I graduated. Throughout this year I was almost entirely working on fully developing and writing two different manuscripts. One of them was a manuscript based on a survey study that the lab conducted before I joined. While the quantitative data analysis was handled by an external data analyst, I conducted the entire qualitative analysis on thousands of responses to open-ended questions. I also worked on the entire interpretation, organization, structure, table making and writing of this manuscript. The paper would go back and forth to others in the lab/other authors not in the lab for suggestions and edits but I essentially built this entire manuscript. When I was graduating I had to leave the lab since they were not offering to continue my employment there. I asked what would be happening with the manuscript after I would leave and was explicitly told by the main research coordinator who I worked with on this project that since I was first author I would be sent all the edits/changes going forward for my consent on them. Once I left I didn’t really hear back from the lab so I routinely sent emails asking for updates every month, in which I also constantly offered to help on any edits or revisions that needed to be done in my free time. I hardly received responses or received inaccurate timelines that just kept getting pushed back. However, I received an email about a week ago from another undergraduate research assistant(who took over the project only after I left) with a new version of the manuscript asking for my edits. When I opened the manuscript I immediately noticed that my name had been replaced as first author for hers instead. I also read through the manuscript and noticed that a lot of the surface language had been changed to clean it up and make it sound nicer but other than that it was still the same content and organization of my manuscript, and mostly the same tables with a few tweaks. I emailed back asking if I was no longer going to be included as first author and was told: “[we](the PI, main research coordinator and this research assistant) thought it was appropriate to adjust authorship because we made substantial revisions to data analysis, interpretation, and manuscript language.” We’re meeting this Friday to discuss it further and I have a few ideas of what I’m going to say but I wanted to ask for any advice/ideas that others may have about this. So far my main points are: (1) I built the entire manuscript from the ground up, (2) the revisions are not substantial enough for this authorship change/it is still essentially the same manuscript I wrote, and (3) I was not consulted or included in the conversation about authorship when I should’ve been