I am a researcher and professional in the social science field, writing a paper in the field of Computer Science together with CS colleagues to be submitted to an interdisciplinary journal, which is in Q1 for all of us.
The authors have the following contributions:
the associate professor (male, last name position in the manuscript, same age as me) chose the technique to be used for the analysis and supervised the work of the PhD student;
the PhD student (female, first name, much younger than me) preprocessed the dataset, made the analysis and the figures (without asking for my opinion, so some of the results came out wrong);
I, the assistant professor, (female, second name) gave suggestions on some aspects of the analysis, the dataset, and the preprocessing, wrote the discussion section commenting on the results, and gave my opinion on their significance for scholars in my field. The idea of analyzing this dataset was mine, as I am the domain expert (although I am not a computer scientist, I publish, review, and organize conferences in this field);
the full professor (male, third name, much older than all of us) is the PhD student's supervisor and only read the paper drafts.
The problem is that the full professor is treating me awfully: he is very disrespectful in his tone and words when communicating with me, and he is rude in his comments on the paragraphs I wrote. He doesn't trust my expert opinion, challenging every word I write (e.g., when I comment on the results, he says he doesn't trust my interpretation and mandates that I add unnecessary explanations). He commented only on the text I wrote in a harsh way and did not say anything about the errors of his PhD student, who made many mistakes.
On the other hand, the PhD student has also been disrespectful to me, ignoring my expert opinion on substantial facts regarding the dataset (she can't assess the content because she is a computer scientist and has no knowledge at all in my field, the dataset is Greek to her), resulting in errors that a reviewer might point out.
The editor-in-chief of the journal is a professor in my field, so I am worried about losing face submitting this article, but on the other hand, if I opt out from the author list, they have no paper because I am the only one who understands the results and I wrote the discussion section.
So far, I did not reply to the full professor's messages and comments because I wanted to preserve the professional relationship. I only defended myself during meetings when he or the PhD student attacked me.
The associate professor has conflict avoidance issues and doesn't stand up for me.
How should I handle the situation? What is the academic etiquette in cases like this? Should I escalate this?
My former supervisor said that I should report the full professor to HR because the way he speaks to me is unacceptable. Would this have consequences against me in the long term?