Hey there..

recently I went to my first conference, where I found out that the organisers of my session are currently inviting submissions for a special issue on the same topic as the session. The paper I presented there was quite well received and I was thinking to give it a go and submit my (revised and extended) conference contribution.

Since the paper I presented there was not directly related to my dissertation topic (nor the department's research emphasis), I was hoping to get someone else more versed in the field to read it first (I did get feedback at the conference of course but it was rather general).

Now my question: do you have experience with approaching other lecturers/profs who have no connection to you or the department to ask them for their opinion/feedback? I'm a bit hesitant to ask someone else to work for free for me, but is this something that's "usually" acceptable? In a way I feel there's nothing wrong with asking, but on the other hand I'd feel better to do that when knowing that it's not an uncommon practice. (I have someone specific in mind at my university who's done work that relates to the topic of my paper.)


Greatly appreciating your thoughts/opnions/experiences..!

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I have had mixed experiences with this. Some academics have been very generous with their [free] time and ideas. Others have paid interest in my work - I have provided them with my work replete with primary sources/ archival material rdirectly relevant to their topic - and they have never responded. Not sure what to make of that - but I would go ahead and just ask people to comment. Sometimes people are generous.







At an academic conference a guy helped me to understand a complex seventeenth-century source because it has associations which as a n00b first-year I was unaware. Two years later and in my last chapter it was invaluable. Another academic at my university made a suggestion at a seminar to increase my chronological scope and her suggestion has improved my thesis immeasurably! So well worth doing. Good luck.


I guess a lot also depends on the proximity of your subject to the prospective reader. I get the feeling that I was used as a cheap and free source for book material once. Which was crap - and hence why to an extent I agree with RubyW: I will not be sending anymore work at this late stage (I am a third year) to people other than those my supervisors know too - once it is a passed thesis I will be more generous with my ideas.

Hi Apple, I was told by one of my sups a few years ago to be careful who I gave my work to. If you know them well and trust them, it's ok, but to spread your ideas about more widely may be a bit dodgy, as they may well use your ideas in their own work without acknowledging you at all. Not everyone has a moral stance that would prevent them from pinching a student's ideas and presenting them as their own. In my own case, the only people who have read my work are my supervisors and a couple of their colleagues, so I know I can trust them. Academia is very competitive and as you're at the start of your academic career, unless your work is already in the public domain to some extent, eg a conf paper or publication, I would be cautious if I were you. Other people on this forum have had bad experiences with this type of issue.

Maybe you should also mention this to your sup. If for whatever reason their supervision or expertise is lacking in some way, maybe you need another official adviser on your supervisory team, in which case protecting your intellectual property would be less of an issue.

Thanks for your input! The issues you raised about intellectual property etc. did not even come to my naive mind when I first pondered about the situation.. so thanks for pointing that out!

It's a tricky issue really, I briefly talked to my supervisor about it after posting here and he seemed doubtful that anyone would be interested in taking on the additional work of commenting on someone's paper if he doesn't even know the person.. and he thought it not to be very common in the academic culture of the country that I'm living/studying...

Hmm.. I'm not sure really what to do, probably I'll leave the issue a bit and think about it again. I guess in the specific case at hand, stealing ideas is less of a problem since I'd be submitting the paper to a journal in April and it's documented that I presented about the same topic at a recent conference (and then the groundbreakingness of the paper is still to be debated :p ). Also, what I'd be interested to receive in terms of feedback from someone versed in the field is not so much an original idea, but rather some tough questions that question my argument or are left unaddressed but would have to be taken into account.. or something.. hm..

but thanks again for your comments, was very helpful to read about your experiences/thoughts.

It is a tricky situation to work your way through sometimes. I'd never thought about it really till my sup told me not to say too much to some established academics who were doing work on the same area that I needed to contact. I guess I'd naively thought it was all one big cosy group working on the same area lol, but that was before I realised how competitive academia is.

The bottom line for me is my answer to various questions: would I mind if any of my ideas or source material were used in someone else's work and I was given no credit for these ideas or research? Would it undermine the content and contribution to knowledge of my PhD if someone else used them, and would I want to use those ideas/sources in the near future to do research on? It is possible to get feedback without teetering over the edge into complete paranoia obviously (!!), I just think it's good to be aware of possible consequences for your own work if you distribute it too freely.