system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I am included in the acknowledgment section of a scientific publication, is this fair ?

To give context to the situation I am a graduate student at my university and took part in a module spanning two semesters with two teammates. Our project was basically concerned with implementing an encoding scheme in python for a certain class of data. In addition to my team, 5 other students also contributed to the project but they worked on different encoding schemes. The overall plan is to bundle all the implementations of the students and release them as a library. Today I was told by the PhD student, that we the students would be listed in the acknowledgment section of the paper and not as authors. I was a bit disappointed by this since I spent a lot of time on this project. However, since I do not have prior experience I wanted to know if this is a fair way to value our contribution.

Edit:
To give more context of what I did. I researched which special subclass of RS code could be applied to this scheme and implemented this subclass of RS code myself. To my knowledge, this is the only open source implementation of the RS code I know and I got 0 help from my supervisors ( they assumed only a normal RS code is needed). I would estimate I spent between 200-350h on the project. With regards to the journal, I do not know in which it will be published but the field is bioinformatics.
gpt
It could be! Without knowing more details it's hard to say about your specific case, but in general yes this is a thing that happens fairly often.

Here is your new rule: Before you work on any project, you sit down and hammer out with the study team whether you will be included as an author and where on the author list. If they say acknowledgement only, then you can decide from there if that's worth it for you.