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human
PhD grad wants 1st author for all his student’s projects

I spent 2 years of undergrad doing doing grunt work for this PhD student. I got all the experiments done and I wrote up the manuscript. I did this project also for my 4th year undergraduate thesis. Based on contribution, we decided it was fair that I would be 1st author. I submitted to a journal and it got rejected. 

Some time passes and now the PhD student wants first authorship because this manuscript is a ‘significant part of his PhD’. Nothing in the manuscript has changed since the previous submission. Our supervisor is extremely non-confrontational and has not helped in mediating the situation except to suggest that we should discuss more. We have been in discussion for 4 months now, with no solution in sight. 

Now after looking at the lab’s publications, I realized that none of the students who did experiments for the PhD (at least 6 students) have ever published their own 1st author paper. The PhD has first authored all of them. The PI set up the lab such that each student had their ‘own’ project and during lab meetings the PI always encouraged us to publish as first authors.

The PhD student is extremely controlling and it seems the PI is also at his whim because they co-authored on a patent. 

Is there anything I can do in this situation? It is evident that I did the majority of the work for the paper, but now the PhD wants to use his position to take 1st author.

Edit: Also wanted to add that my thesis was copy-and-pasted and used verbatim as a chapter of the PhD’s thesis. Is that common practice?
gpt
This is difficult to assess without more information.  Doctoral students do sometimes have helpers such as undergraduates who gain some research experience. What is important is not only who did the grunt work but whose idea was the hypothesis. OP's language of "did experiments *for*" the doctoral student make me question whether these were the doctoral students' ideas. The lesson learned here is that it is crucial to establish authorship order early on so there are no misunderstandings. For this particular case, it was already established that OP would be first author so unless something changes there is no reason to switch. The PI needs to step in here.