Mods: Please forgive me and delete this post if it falls outside of acceptable discussion for this subreddit.
I am a PhD student who has found discussions on this subreddit to be very rewarding, but so far I have been hesitant to ask any questions or start any discussions dealing with actual research work I am doing either for a paper or my dissertation.
This has been for a few reasons:
A fear of having my ideas stolen. Some of my ideas are quite novel (others not so much), and I worry about making comments about my dissertation work and find out 6 months from now that I have to start over because similar work has just been published.
A fear of having my work called into question as not being my own. Certainly, I get input from my committee and other graduate students, but if there is a public discussion here which leads to a good idea, can I really claim it as my own contribution to the field? What might happen if my committee or a potential employer sees that the idea was generated through a public thread on reddit and not a purely individual effort.
A fear of being accused of plagiarism/stealing work for using ideas that someone else suggested here.
Am I the only person who worries about these issues?
tl;dr: Is posting my current research methods/topics a bad idea or not?
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