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I was reading some papers and I came up with some ideas that I think are interesting. But I am worried that someone else is working on it. It would be a waste of time if I try to prove something and then somebody else proves it first. I'm in math. What kind of ways are there to minimize working on problems that other people are working on?

cgb5436
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  • Google scholar? – Adrian Keister Aug 26 '22 at 21:55
  • I am also in math, and from my experience you can not know... I have encountered dozens of cases (including myself) where different people worked on the same problem. But at the end of the day it was not a bad thing, in most cases all parties get to publish their results and usually this gives you an opportunity to build connections with other mathematicians. – Yanko Aug 27 '22 at 12:19

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In some fields, like CS, you attend a lot of conferences and talk to a lot of people and keep your eyes and ears open.

But it isn't possible to know everything. If you are working on a hot area just assume others are along for the ride. If your area is a bit obscure, then you may have the field to yourself.

But if you have a lot of communication lines open to others in your narrow area then you may get a whiff early enough. And that can open lines to collaboration, rather than necessarily leading you to abandon your thoughts.

And of course, read at least the abstracts from the obvious places to publish such work, as well, perhaps, as scanning preprint servers to see what pops up.

No guarantees though. I know two people who got simultaneous PhDs for essentially the same work done completely independently even though they knew one another. They just hadn't communicated their research. It took a year, actually, for both universities to determine there was no plagiarism and the work was independent. But the awarding of degrees is a slightly different matter.

Buffy
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Which early career stage are you at? If you are a PhD student discussing interesting topics for further study is one of the key tasks of your advisor, especially early in the PhD when you haven't yet found a thesis topic.

If you are a bachelor or masters student I would assume your ideas are closely related to one of the lectures you took, so you should talk to the lecturer.

In general figuring out whether other people are currently working on a problem is hard but senior people in the field usually have an idea who is working in the area and what they are working on.

quarague
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