Hello,
I have to ask one trivial question as a beginner on phd studies. I found an very good article in my topic, that has a nice experiment and result published. I would like to rerun that experiment and I have some new ideas, but programing whole thing would take me months...

Did you ever contact authors of article to ask for a source code (or anything similar), and if you did so what was their answer. Is it a regular practice to contact and ask, or not.

Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure how it works in other disciplines but in molecular biology we often contact random labs and ask for different strains, plasmids etc and mostly get good responses.

Thank you very much for your respond.

I hope someone else will write his/her experience.

It's perfectly ok to ask for these things. Note that the author might expect something in return e.g. a mention in the acknowlegments section in the published version of your paper.

Thank you.

I sent an e-mail, so we shall see. :-)

You might contact an author to verify a few aspects of a paper. Most people are ahppy to answer the odd question.

However, I would keep contact to the bare necessities as often the authors are busy people and serious nuisance e-mailers end up being ignored or marked as junk mail senders.

The other reason to contact an author might be to suggest a collaberation.

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)