Approaching external researchers for help with a PhD project?

[flagler20]

My adviser is great and I have no complaints about my committee (which is very small by typical PhD standards), but none of my committee members are experts in a certain set of methods I want to use.  I have identified a professor from a different University (in the foreign country where my research will be based) who is an expert in the methods, and has actually applied them in the same area where I will conduct my research.  I would very much like to reach out to this professor and pick his brain and hopefully get some good guidance, but I don't know what would be in it for him.  I don't want to repeat his work exactly, but rather build on it and use similar methods to answer what I think are some very interesting questions that he has neglected.  I've never talked to the guy before and I'm afraid that if I sat down and discussed my research with him and asked him for advice he might take some of my ideas.  On the other hand he could potentially be very valuable in helping me with data collection and analysis.  So I was wondering what incentive he would have to help me, and specifically whether an invitation to serve on my committee as an external member would be seen as an attractive offer.  I suppose he might see it as securing co-authorship on a resulting paper, which I wouldn't mind.  Does anybody have experience with anything similar?  How would I reach out to him initially?

[TakeruK]

In my field, it is very common to have collaborators outside of your university (my last paper had people from 7 different places!). Whether you can easily have committee members outside of your school depends on your school's policies, so you should go over them with your advisor as well. At my current school, we are allowed to have external committee members only if we can demonstrate the committee lacks a specific skillset, which sounds like your case!

 

I think approaching this other professor through your advisor might be a good idea. You should definitely decide exactly how involved you want this external professor to be though. Think about it and decide for yourself, and then talk to your advisor about this and then rethink it with your advisor's advice in mind.

 

Do you want this other professor to be involved at the co-advisor level? This can be tricky because like you said, 1) what's in it for the external prof? and 2) your own advisor/department might not like that you are being co-advised by someone else but they are paying you 100% of your costs! And you want to make sure you trust this person to not steal your idea or otherwise screw you over.

 

Or, do you want this other professor to just provide input for a specific part of your work? I've been invited to collaborate on papers by people at other universities before, and when they do this, they talk to me about my specific involvement only. For example, they might ask me to use code I already have to analyze one piece of data and provide them with the result. They might discuss the overall goal of their paper with me so that I have the right context, but I don't usually see the whole thing together until it's the final (or penultimate) draft before journal submission.

 

Overall, I think getting advice from your professor is a good idea. They might know how the person likes to be contacted and whether or not they would be a good co-advisor. I found that most academics are happy to have people like you contact them about their work. Also, it might help for the committee invitation to come later on and maybe along with a note from your advisor asking them to join and detailing what the requirements/duties are. Good luck!

[flagler20]

Thanks for that reply.  Very helpful advice.

[serenade]

Weird. I was just about to post almost the exact same question in the Research board, but I happened to see this one first. Good timing. 

 

As to contacting external professors, I've always approached it with the mindset to just ask them for information/advice about a specific research topic rather than try to involve them as a co-advisor/comm member. Not that the latter is a bad idea by any means, but if it feels like too much of an imposition, you can always just send brief emails asking for help on a specific question without asking him to commit to helping in a formal, long-term way. 

 

My intended question actually related to the concept of someone 'stealing' your research ideas if you contact them for help. I could see the need to be cautious in doing this with current grad students, but is it safe to talk to senior scholars without worrying about them taking your ideas?

[TakeruK]

My intended question actually related to the concept of someone 'stealing' your research ideas if you contact them for help. I could see the need to be cautious in doing this with current grad students, but is it safe to talk to senior scholars without worrying about them taking your ideas?

 

I don't think it's safer. Actually, I think it is even more dangerous** than other current grad students! If a senior scholar wants to do your idea, they can probably do it themselves very quickly (much faster than a graduate student) or they can even get their own students/labs/groups to work on it. 

 

(** This is relative, in general, I think that while the risk is always there when you discuss incomplete work, there are certainly many ways to manage this risk and you don't have to resort to never talking to anyone until it's published!).

[serenade]

TakeruK, what are ways to manage the risk? Be really vague when discussing research? Just curious as I begin to navigate this process.

[TakeruK]

Here a few example ways:

 

1. Get your advisor's advice. They have been around for longer than you and they might know certain things about people. My field is small enough that when someone does something like that, people will remember and talk about it. 

 

2. Usually I work with people that I or my advisor have collaborated with in the past.

 

3. Involve your advisor in conversations with the collaborator. A bad person might try to trick an unsuspecting grad student but they might hesitate to cross someone more established.

 

4. You probably wouldn't want to just tell them everything right away and then ask if they want to be involved. Have a few conversations to feel things out first and see what you think. 

 

5. Know what you are expecting from the collaboration. Focus your discussions around this point. Also, if you are involving someone external for just a specific part, I would generally wait until you need that piece before contacting the external person, minus any lead time. 

 

6. When it's time to start working together, make sure both sides are clear what the expectations are (how much is the external person contributing: sending you code? running an analysis? writing part of the paper? and what are they getting in return: coauthorship? acknowledgement? use of your data in other analysis they would want to do? something else?)

 

7. (This is not just related to collaborators): Don't present your projects at conferences until they are closer to being finished!

[serenade]

Ah, thanks. Very helpful, particularly #3. Good to keep in mind. 

[Humulus_lupulus]

Start off very, very vague with what you possibly want help with and why that person would be a good collaborator. I've personally had a well-established faculty member try and take credit for my ideas once we were getting to the patent step, so be careful. Form the connection, lay out the guidelines, find a way to get your ideas in writing with your current advisor/committee, and move from there.

 

I like to think the best about people, but in my case, sometimes world-renowned scientists DO try to steal credit from undergraduates who are trying to get established in the scientific community.

[serenade]

Just out of curiosity, Humulus, what happened? Did he succeed in taking your idea or were you able to stop him?

[Humulus_lupulus]

Nope, we saw that he wanted to take credit for my stuff, consulted with someone at our university, and jumped on an invention disclosure. The process entailed a submission at both our university and his university, then a review/revision process with discussion of royalties if it went to patent. We included him in the authors on our submission, but he was mad that we did it without saying anything so the project just got dropped. Unfortunate, but I am looking to use some of the data from that project for a PhD proposal, so it wasn't a total loss for me. Plus, it taught me a valuable lesson to make sure I have all my bases covered before entering a future collaboration.