Unsung Work

There's a discussion thread over in The Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities' forum on acknowledging a core facility's input to a project. The discussion kicked off when a core facility manager wrote in saying that her core had helped with the design, execution, and analysis of an experiment, yet the resulting paper said that graduate students had designed and done the work; it did also say that a core was involved. One suggestion to solve this problem was to get all that straightened out upfront, before any work is done or even during the grant application process. Many of the commenters on the thread say this is common, but that core managers should speak up. "If this is a post-doc or grad student learning from their PI that this is acceptable behavior, that is bad especially in this day and age," writes in Deb McMillen.