Can I contact a professor who works on my same work During my PhD I worked on a specific topic. My thesis is published at my university website. This has been done one year ago. Today, I found that one professor (not my supervisor and not from the same institute. I do not know them personally) give a presentation on a conference about the same idea as mine. Even their future work are the same a my other PhD chapter. They expressed their idea as a novel one. Do I need to contact them? If so, what should I tell them?
I do not know if they know about my thesis or not. Also, my work was built up on existing work. They even do not cite any existing works. I do not know why, but may be they do not know about these works. So I do not suggest any bad thing about them. Just would like to know what should do for this situation.
I respect the professor so much. So again no bad suggestion about her or any one of her group. She may at the beginning of the research and did not update her literature review yet.
You do not &quot;need&quot; to contact them. The fact that your work was on a university website does not mean that anyone has seen it.
Unless there are subtler clues that they just copied your work, you should treat that work as completely independent of yours.
If you email them, do not express any doubts about their honesty, etc. This would in-any-case terminally alienate them. Rather, say that you have similar interests, as visible in your thesis, which actually obtains some similar results.
Do NOT make any remarks about how your thesis was on-line for a year, and &quot;should have been cited&quot;, etc. Things don't really work that way.
Again, most often it's not that people are cheating, but that they have similar ideas, due to similar contexts...