Hello fellow medical writers. I have a problem and I genuinely don't know what to do next.
I have worked for 2 years as a research fellow with a group of physicians. I spent 2 years painstakingly collecting data (over 2000 hours of data collection), but that project was handed from person to person and the PI never did anything with the data. I have emailed, called and showed up in person to ask what the next steps are and how we can get this project moving but I have never gotten a clear response. This is a huge data set. There is no way I can work on this project on my own. The PI has the permissions and contacts to move the project forward. It has now been 4 years since my fellowship and the project has stagnated. I now work another full time job.
Last week, going through my emails, I found a draft of an article ready for journal submission. Curious about what became of that arm of the project, I googled it and found that it had been published in a very impactful journal 3 years ago without giving me any credit. Not only did I collect that data but I also analyzed it, presented it and wrote the abstract for it. The bulk of the work was done, there was some minor tweaking to do before writing it up for submission. I reached out to the PI to ask about this and their response was, "There's nothing we can do about this now, I'll keep you in mind for future publications."
On one hand, I'm livid. This was a lot of work on my part and I have gotten no credit for it. On the other hand, they are still the PI on the rest of the data set and hold the key to any future publications. I don't want to burn any bridges. I know that its annoying to have to reach out to a journal and request and addendum/erratum to include another author, but its probably going to be a couple of hours of work on their part?
I don't know what to do. At this point I feel like its 2 years of work down the drain. I reached out to the PI about the remaining data and they said that now that I have experience in the field and no one else is working on this, I can take charge of the project (with them remaining PI). The PI asked me to contact the last person that was in charge. I've written to that person over 10 times in the last 4 years asking to be involved, with no response. My last email was sent last week, still no response.
Do I escalate this? Do I let it go? Do I continue working with this person? How do I make sure they don't take advantage of my work again? Please help.