<p>I heard of a very strange situation the other day. A friend of mine was working with her advisor on a project. It was very close to publication and they had done significant solid analysis. About the same time they published, a former student(now a Prof.) of my friend’s advisor published work that eerily similar to the work my friend was doing. Both papers were sorta published at the same time and so my friend, her advisor, and her advisor’s former student are sorta taking joint credit for the ideas. My friends advisor and my friends advisor’s former student were not on any grants together, but as I understand, they talk regularly. My friend is really upset. She is worried her advisor was sharing key parts of her work.</p>
<p>What do you all think? This does not make sense to me. Why would her advisor ever share work with a former student in that way? Any thoughts would be appreciated.</p>
<p>If they worked under the same advisor, it’s possible that they were both working on very similar types of research and thus the former student came to the same research conclusions on his own. For example, I have a labmate that works on very similar research to mine - we have close interests - and therefore, I would not be surprised if she came out with results that were very close to mine.</p>
<p>It’s unlikely that your friend’s advisor shared enough of the information necessary for the former student to publish the work. The advisor would have to share not only the findings, but the data collection and analyses done as well. Even if the former student were there for the data collection and knows the methods well, that former student would’ve had to have done the analyses necessary - which could take weeks or months depending on the methods used - and would be unlikely to have published work at about the same time as people who were already working on that. So I suspect that this was a line of research he or she was already interested in and was working on it simultaneously.</p>
<p>If your friend is really concerned, she should talk to her advisor and ask him/her what’s up.</p>