Is there a rule against this?

[Futuredoc1997199]

I am an M1 who has been working on a project in a shared drive that was to be turned into a literature review later this summer with a team of entirley M1s. Invitations were sent to only some of the contributors by the M1 leaders to continue onto the lit review to “everyone who contributed.” Some people were shut out and the file deleted from the drive with the original file containing evidence of the people not invited involvement. (I contributed to the document and was invited). But I am very annoyed work I did was deleted without my permission. Is there a rule against doing something like this, specifically the deletion of others work?

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[mrbreakfast]

Depends on your school's policies, but I would say almost certainly not, particularly if the work you uploaded was into a file/drive owned by another person, and particularly since it occurred in an extracurricular context.

 

[wysdoc]

I am an M1 who has been working on a project in a shared drive that was to be turned into a literature review later this summer with a team of entirley M1s. Invitations were sent to only some of the contributors by the M1 leaders to continue onto the lit review to “everyone who contributed.” Some people were shut out and the file deleted from the drive with the original file containing evidence of the people not invited involvement. (I contributed to the document and was invited). But I am very annoyed work I did was deleted without my permission. Is there a rule against doing something like this, specifically the deletion of others work?

Didn't you save a copy of your own writings? Could be that there was duplication of information from several sources and repetition.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Who owned the document? I don't know about rules... it sounds like an internal class matter. Tell me more what happened.

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

Almost sounds like somebody is trying to get other M1 to put in the legwork and then steal the work for the literature review.

This would obviously be an academic honesty violation. All document editing softwares track changes so wouldn’t be hard to see who did what

Maybe I’m misinterpreting

 

[mrbreakfast]

Almost sounds like somebody is trying to get other M1 to put in the legwork and then steal the work for the literature review.

OP says they still have access to the file and are part of the group. It's not like they were excluded. It's not 100% clear to me what the issue here is, but it's good practice to make copies of everything. If I'm working on a presentation with a colleague on a shared drive, I have an exact copy on my personal drive and on my hard drive. It's more to prevent accidental deletions, but can also provide security.

This would obviously be an academic honesty violation.

This is where things get tricky with student research. You could argue that the preliminary work on a literature review (presumably finding articles) by a self-organized group composed solely of medical students does not constitute academic activity governed by the medical school - I'm not sure how'd that play out. Besides, research groups can exclude people who aren't contributing to the standards of the group. It's hard to say what specifically is going on here.

 

[Osteosaur]

Is there a project lead or faculty advisor?

Generally speaking if you're a professional student you shouldn't do something in violation of the ethics of that profession. Randomly pulling people off a project like this, or deleting/denying access to their work without warning, is not professional. Are these people who joined the project and fell off the wagon?

I think your best bet is to resolve this internally. Find out who did it, and why, and it might be possible to recover the deleted files within a window. Barring that reach out to a dean because, well, as M1's submitting a literature review you're going to be slapping your school's name on it as your affiliation. You aren't just a group of private people doing private research.

As a bit of life advice always back up anything you write to a place only YOU control. When I wrote publications I had copies on my work computer, an email, everywhere.

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

I forgot to ask, is it standard that med students can write their own literature reviews and submit to journals or does a PI have to approve and oversee?

 

[Goro]

I forgot to ask, is it standard that med students can write their own literature reviews and submit to journals or does a PI have to approve and oversee?

You need a PI