A paper was published with material from my thesis without my knowledge: Correction or Retraction?

See note and caveat at the end.

I suggest that you have a retraction done. You didn't participate directly in the preparation of the offending paper, so adding you as an author is a bit fishy. Moreover, adding you would connect you to people who seem to have no ethical boundaries. I'd guess that you don't want that association.

If the retraction is issued, especially with an explanation, it will be a warning to the others not to continue to abuse you and your work.

Once retracted, you should be free to use your own work in any (legal) way you choose. Especially since any copyright assignment by the others would be cancelled as well, since they had no right to issue it.


When I wrote the above, my assumption was that the "other" authors here were not personally known to the OP. Clarification has made that assumption false.

So, let me add, primarily for others who might, in future, wind up in a similar situation that it can be extremely dangerous to one's career to accuse your advisor of wrongdoing. My normal advice in such situations is to try to work with the advisor long enough and politely enough so that you can get away and out from under any influence they might have over your career. The exceptions might be for the case in which the transgression is extremely blatant and for the case in which the person has already developed an independent career. The first case is still dangerous, of course, but necessity may require it. In that case, however, you need allies so that you don't become the focus of hate directed by a powerful person. Another way to say it is to take a long view about your career. Any given paper is only a small pert of your reputation. Optimize for the future, not necessarily for the present.

I think the OP here, however, is already in the second situation, having shown independence and development past the degree. I'll therefore leave my original answer in place.

Note that the ethics is the same, whether the transgressions are by people known to you or not. But self preservation is often necessary for a young researcher until that certain level of independence is achieved.


In addition to the advice being offered to retract (rather than correct) the journal article, I suggest that you contact the officials at the university where you did the thesis. I imagine that the legal office at the university will be especially interested to learn about violations of copyright by their faculty. Should such information become "public knowledge", the faculty, department, and perhaps even the university may be put on record officially or by unofficial word of mouth that they should be held ineligible for external funding. Indeed, when your thesis was supported by a national funding agency in the US, I believe such violations of copyright could even lead to requests for a return of the sponsor's funds.

Your first contact with the legal offices should be to summarize your case and ask for insights on how they would handle it going forward.