My work was published and my name was nowhere to be found: how should I handle this?
This seems to be a real case of Scientific misconduct by your former supervisor. By common scientific ethics, everybody who made significant scientific contributions to a publication must be named as an author.

In practice, violations of this rule occur, and there are several options for you to react to it. In fact, several institutions have a responsibility to follow up on indications of scientific misconduct, any of which you could try to approach on this matter.


The research institution itself is responsible for investigating any possible scientific misconduct of their members. The question is of course which organizational level to approach first. The level just above your former supervisor may have conflicts of interest, but any higher levels may suggest that it should be dealt with on lower levels first. This is probably best judged from the local situation.
Journals and conferences must make sure that scientific results they publish were obtained in adherence to standard scientific rules. Editors of the journal have the responsibility to investigate problematic cases, and may take measures such as correcting the author list or retracting the paper. If you want to take this approach, it would be best to contact the editor in chief of the journal (if it is a journal publication).
National science foundations usually have their own rules concerning scientific misconduct, and investigate cases where violations may have occured. This applies especially if the research was (co-)funded by such an organisation (check the acknowledgments of the paper in question, or it may have directly been your former source of funding), but some foundations also take this role more generally and may feel responsible if the scientist in question gets any money from them. An easy approach will be if the foundation in your country has a contact point for scientific misconduct. Otherwise you could ask the central administration there how best to proceed.


In any case, secure your documents. Drafts or analysis results that you sent to your former supervisor will probably be a very important proof of your claims.

Also, before you take any of these quite serious steps, it could be helpful to confront your former supervisor with the issue. You can clearly state that you see it as a case of scientific misconduct, and that you are willing to pursue the case with any accountable institutions such as the ones I listed above.