I belong from a developing country so the law and order is a joke. Our professors are notorious for stealing student papers. They will tell us that they will have our papers published in a reputable journal if we agree to make them the first author even though they contribute nothing. Heck they don’t even belong in the academia because all their work is ghostwritten by paying a few dollars to students.
I have to submit my papers and some of them are really good. I don’t want them to steal my work (sometimes they do without even asking), so, how do I protect my work in a lawless country?
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Just don’t give it to them. They have no ability to get your work into legitimate journals. Submit and deal directly with journals. They’ll tell you if your work is any good.
Add a “paper town.” Mapmakers would add fake towns in the middle of nowhere to prevent others from stealing their work. They would add several, so there was no question that the work was plagiarized.
For your papers, you could add a few benign references to your bibliography. Boring paper that your professor would not want to read.
However, if you wanted to be vindictive, you could also add a block of text that is directly plagiarized. You need to be careful in you selection. Something that your professor would not recognize. If you go this route and your work is stolen, you can just write the other author a paper letter and say “Good day, sir/madam, I was reading your (2023) paper and the attached reference in succession and I noticed that author x used the following block of text from your paper without attribution. I am not certain if you two are collaborating, and I certainly don’t want to claim plagiarism, but I felt compelled to bring this to your attention.”
The fallout may be minor, but there will be fallout.
sorry i don’t have a solution but this sounds horrible. never knew people could stoop so low. hang in there!