Thanks! I emailed the student suggesting some reading to help her decide on a topic and she replied thanking me for my help.

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Thanks for the great advice :)

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Hi everyone,

I wondered if I could please ask for your advice about a situation that has arisen about a student reading my unpublished work.

An undergraduate student emailed my supervisor asking for help with her dissertation, as she has just begun doing some preliminary research and is trying to nail down a specific research area. The student said that there wasn't much data on a particular topic, to which my supervisor replied saying that she was surprised to hear this since I had just completed my Masters dissertation on the same subject. My supervisor copied me into this email, in which she also said that if the student contacts me, I may be willing to send her my research. The student has subsequently emailed me asking if this would be possible, copying my supervisor into her message.

I am really wary about sending my work to the student, for a number of reasons. Firstly, one of my dissertation markers advised me to publish my research, which is something that I would definitely like to pursue at some point, so I am concerned about sending around unpublished work. Secondly, the student said in her email to me that her topic seems to be in a very similar vein to mine, even though she hasn't yet decided on a topic and she hasn't read any of my work before, which makes me wonder if she is looking around for ideas. Thirdly, I don't know the undergraduate student at all so am worried about the risks of plagiarism.

I therefore wondered what your thoughts were about situations like this and whether I am right to be cautious about sending students my unpublished work? The thing is, if the student does decide to do research in the same area as I did, my supervisor might want me to send the student my work later down the line.

Any advice is much appreciated - many thanks! :-)

Thanks to both of you for your advice. I've done exactly that :-)

On my Masters course, I have a friend who is currently doing research using the same methodology that I have used in a couple of previous projects. He's asked to read one of my essays as he's not sure how to discuss his results. I'm a bit wary of sending him an essay - recently he did a presentation where the title of his talk was extremely similar to one that me and my supervisors did and it couldn't have been a coincidence. He's a really competitive person, especially with me. I'm thinking that I might just send him one of my presentations that he has seen before even though it isn't quite what he was asking for. I hope you don't mind me posting this in the PhD forum - I thought you will probably have more experience of this sort of thing. How do you all deal with people like this? Many thanks :-)