My thesis supervisor published a paper from my MA thesis with herself as first author without my consent

Sorry you're dealing with this. It is unethical for someone to publish your work without your consent, full stop. But as far as I know there is nothing illegal about it - honestly, I would put the idea of "punishment" out of your mind. I think that attitude will only hurt you in the long run.

Why do you want the article retracted anyway? You say in the comments it is a good paper published in a good journal. Isn't this good for you? I would shoot for a correction of author order more than anything else.

From my perspective, there is a lot that doesn't make sense about your question/story. I have to wonder if there is some miscommunication here rather than intentional malice. Taken at face value, the best and really only thing you should do is talk to your advisor. If that doesn't clear the air, you can of course directly contact the journal. Any reputable journal will take you seriously. You could probably force a retraction since you did not consent to publication. Just know that you will be burning bridges by doing this.

Past that, I don't think there is much to do other than move on and possibly avoid working with your supervisor in the future.

To quote you:

I want the article to be removed from the journal where it is published, and I also want my supervisor to get punished for conducting such unethical practice.

Well, for all sorts of reasons, it's not going to happen. Clearly, you're upset, but your upset is muddling your thinking. For example, you being upset does not convert your supervisor's behavior (whether or not it was unethical) into a "crime". Moreover, if you allow your anger, bitterness, and desire for revenge to drive you to try and have your supervisor punished and the paper retracted, the most likely outcome from my experience is that you will injure yourself far more than any injury (if indeed any at all) you will cause to your supervisor.

Despite your assertion that "the whole work has been done by me", I doubt that it is correct, either in the context of your thesis or in the context of the paper. I'm not doubting that you did all of the writing. Indeed, it would be very odd for a supervisor to write any part of a student's thesis. But unless:

• you enrolled with her as a supervisor
• never had a conversation with her
• submitted the thesis without her reading it or commenting on it

and then

• your supervisor took the complete intact thesis and published the entirety without rewriting, selecting, or editing any part of it

one must conclude that your supervisor actually did do some work.

The short version

Talk to your supervisor. Tell her how upset you are. But let go of the revenge quest.

1. The fact that your paper is published in a good journal is great news for you. Congratulations! Not all MA graduates have a published paper. You now have a substantial advantage in case you want to apply to a Ph.D. program later on.

Probably, your advisor thought she was doing you a favor by publishing a paper for you, while saving you the hassle of the technical submission process.

2. The fact that you are not the first author is indeed frustrating, but it also depends on the field: in mathematics and similar fields, the habit is to list the authors in alphabetical order. If your thesis is in such a field, and your surname happens to be alphabetically larger than your advisor's surname, then the author order is fine, and you have no reason to complain.

If this is not the case, and you really think that you should have been the first author, then I would suggest that you contact your advisor, thank her for submitting a paper for you, and ask her to change the author order. If she does not do this, you can also directly ask the journal to change the author order.

In any case, I definitely recommend against removing the article from the journal. It is better to have a paper with a "wrong" author order, then to not have a paper at all.

To take the questions separately:

I want the article to be removed from the journal where it is published

Write to the journal and tell them you don't consent to be an author. Most probably they will tell your supervisor, and potentially retract the paper if the authorship dispute cannot be resolved. All authors have to consent to be listed as an author, and if you withhold your name then your supervisor can't publish it since it becomes plagiarism.

I also want my supervisor to get punished for conducting such unethical practice

Your university likely has a research misconduct committee of some kind. You can bring the dispute there. Here's an example from the Nanyang Technological University.

Warning: if you do either of these things you are escalating the dispute, big time. Your relationship with your supervisor is likely to be heavily damaged, possibly beyond repair. Are you sure you want to do this? You might want to talk to your supervisor first and hear their point of view before doing anything. If that's too intimidating, consider talking to another faculty member of perhaps your head of department.

Academia is a system with a strong power gradient. Tenured persons only really get punished if they create a problem for someone higher up, or for an institution as a whole.

Put the feeling of being wronged aside for a second and think about what happens when you try to stir this up. Is your claim correct? Try to think about it from as many angles as possible. How to prove your claim? Will someone listen at all? And most importantly: what can you win, is it worth the damage? Is it worth to get the stigma of trouble maker (not fair, but unfortunately human)?

Escalating to the journal will probably only harm you. No one will really care and even if you get them to change something, it will be marketed as an honest mistake, typo like, and internally you will be known as the problem student. Academia is not fair, the only real power you have is to vote with your feet and go somewhere else.

I think it is highly unethical and a crime.

What you think is unethical or illegal may have no basis in reality and may therefore be immaterial to achieving any of your (rather bluntly stated) desires.

What steps can I take in this regard?

You must first define whether the actions you note are prohibited by a defined rule (are a "crime" by your wording) and/or whether the actions may be unacceptable by published or commonly-grounded ethical guidelines.

You can determine whether publishing without your permission provides grounds for a valid legal claim. What are the requirements for the journal publication? Does the journal require that all authors must give permission? If so, why did they publish without your permission? What punishment subsequently best befits the violation? What are the requirements from the university where you did your work? Do you hold sole copyright on distributing specific content from your thesis, for example the figures? Here though, since your name is on the article, what recourse do you truly have to claim a violation and seek punishment? Legality issues mostly end beyond this point.

In addition, you can seek insights about where the failure occurred in communications such that the publication was completed without informing you or without putting you as first author. By example, one extreme case is that your advisor faced a deadline, (mistakenly or not) presumed that you had no time to contribute to rewriting your thesis work in the format required for a publication, completed the rewrite entirely on her own, and put her name first because she technically did write the publication. The opposing extreme case is that your advisor wrote your thesis work in the format for a publication on the (mistaken or not) presumption that doing so gave her the full right to put her name as the first author. Finally, a third case is that your advisor knew full well by experience after working with you on your thesis that you would demonstrate an insufficient level of commitment to be able to complete a publication from your thesis in a responsible and timely manner, and that she (mistakenly or not) thereby took the situation fully into her own hands.

In the end, you have a publication with your name on it for no additional effort on your part. If you will argue that your permission was required, first prove so, either from specific statements given by the journal itself or by equivalent proof of sole copyright holding for the work itself. Otherwise, you appear to want us to commensurate and gnash about for a perceived violation of ethics that may instead simply be a failure on your part or your advisor's part to communicate effectively. To play devil's advocate against your proposed actions (that are in themselves rather blunt), consider why you should not simply thank your advisor and move on.

From your question, we can conclude that your MA thesis supervisor has acted selfishly.

Your next steps should depend on what you want to achieve; then think of which action would benefit you the most.

If your supervisor is already an established name in your field, with lots of cited papers in high-profile publications, then consider keeping the publication as-is, so as to boost your own career chances.

On the other hand, if you think it would benefit you to have the publication retracted (and to republish your thesis work as your own publication) then it would be logical to pursue that path. As others have pointed out, it won't be easy as it will largely depend on the cooperation of the publisher of the journal.

First, double-check under which license you have provided your thesis. Does it allow for re-usage and, if so, in which form? Was your thesis cited in the published article? Next, contact the editor and explain that you are a non-consenting author. You will need to provide strong arguments for the editor to consider retracting the entire publication instead of removing your name from the list of co-authors, which is likely not what you want.