How to respond to the trivialisation of one’s work and unjustified demands for a considerable extension of the research? I am a graduate student in engineering whose work includes a lot of programming and implementation of the developed theories. I am not a computer scientist, but I am a fairly skilled programmer, at least when compared to other people in the field.

In the recent months I went to a few conferences and to meetings with partners participating in my research project. In most cases my supervisor attends these events as well. We do not have the same background, and while I get a lot of support from him, there are some gaps where he is not proficient and does not have a good overview, especially about the amount of work required to get something implemented. In such tasks we have a relation that is based on trust that I am doing a correct job, which gets disrupted when other researchers are involved, as described in the continuation.

At such events I have encountered the problem that some people boldly enquire why I did not research or develop a particular (usually irrelevant) feature, and give suggestions for the extension of the work which are far beyond the scope of my project and time. This is especially the case about programming, and it comes from people who have never implemented anything. For some of the suggestions, I would need my own research team and a few years of funding. And sometimes the people asking such questions try to show-off in front of others by trivialising my research. This is annoying. And this situation gets worse when I give a simplified presentation of my work in order to make it more understandable to a wider audience. On conferences I see that other young researchers experience the same problem.
Indeed I am a young researcher and it may look like I am overestimating my work, but I have a good overview of the field and I have no issues with suggestions that require an additional but reasonable amount of work. My papers so far all got good reviews, and at my department I am one of the most productive graduate students, which makes me confident that I am on the right path and do more than enough work.

While I tend to ignore such demands, this puts me in a difficult position when it is about a topic where my supervisor does not have expertise. My supervisor gets a wrong impression that I am not doing a right job, and that my work is basic touching only the tip of the iceberg. Other people in the audience instantly get such opinion as well. This escalated today when I have received a very good review of a paper that I have submitted with my supervisor. From the beginning I was very confident about the work, however, when presenting it around, I run into issues described above. So the comment of my supervisor on the review was “I am happy to see that you have improved your work after the initial hiccups and confusion. You did not research what others told you to do, so we have been lucky here.” This was really annoying because my work was never in question, and from day one I have followed the same path and did not encounter any difficulty. So this gives you an idea how much such comments on conference may influence one’s opinion about a work.

Is there a general way how to deal with such situations at conferences and meetings?  Luckily I have not encountered this behaviour during peer-reviews, but if I had, it'd be easier because it doesn't require an instant reaction.

I have some generic answers such as:


“Thanks for your suggestion. I have been thinking about this, but it requires too much work, and that is outside the scope of my project. Further, it would not significantly contribute to the value of the work.”
“I have considered it, but I don’t find it of interest, so I have decided not to do it. If you are interested in this topic, I invite you to collaborate.”
“That seems to be an interesting point. We can discuss this at the break in further details.”


but sometimes they do not give the desired outcome because people can be persistent.
It is important to recognize that this is not happening to you because you are a junior researcher. At every point in your career, somebody will feel (and, distressingly often, openly state) that your work is not good enough, goes into the wrong direction, is not "real" science, tackles the wrong problems, uses the wrong tools, or is in some other way flawed. Learning how to react to criticism regarding your work, even and especially if said criticism is coming from more senior researchers, is a crucial skill that every PhD student needs to learn. I feel it is best to stop relying on your advisor to justify your contribution as soon as possible.

In that vein, I think you should see these situations at conferences and meetings as opportunities to learn rather than ugly situations that you need to weasle out of as fast as possible. I do not mean that you should get into nasty fights with the audience during the Q&amp;A part of a presentation, but I am certain you do have good reasons why you did some things and did not do other things. Do not try to evade ("Let's discuss this in the break, ok?"), but try to explain calmly why you did what you did. Yes, maybe that person asking the question will disagree, but so what? The fact that your actual peer reviews are good shows that there are a non-trivial amount of researchers that actually agree with you. The person asking the question is not your supervisor, you don't need to agree with him/her specifically on your research agenda or approaches. 

Let me go over your proposed blanket statements one by one:


  “Thanks for your suggestion. I have been thinking about this, but it requires too much work, and that is outside the scope of my project. Further, it would not significantly contribute to the value of the work.”


That's ok, but I would leave away the part about "not significantly contributing to the value of the work". That sounds a bit too confrontational to me. Better just leave it at "that's really interesting, but we currently do not have the resources to tackle this complex problem".


  “I have considered it, but I don’t find it of interest, so I have decided not to do it. If you are interested in this topic, I invite you to collaborate.”


Stay clear from passive-aggressiveness. 


  “That seems to be an interesting point. We can discuss this at the break in further details.”


Ok, but can come across as too defensive. I use the "ok, let's discuss this one-on-one" phrase usually only when somebody is asking variations of the same question over and over again, and it seems likely to me that the rest of the audience is already zoomed out of the conversation. However, in that case, a good session chair has already stepped in anyway.

How you could react is the following:

"Thank you for your interesting suggestion. We have indeed discussed a variation of this before, but implementing it in practice would require us to first do [complex thing A] and [complex thing B], which have been shown to be non-trivial efforts in the first place in [optimally you have some reference why this is indeed hard]. This would certainly improve the quality of our solution, but we are currently more looking towards extending our work into [more feasible other direction]. Of course, if you are interested in this, I would be very happy to discuss potential collaborations over [hot beverage of your choice]."

(a variation of your first suggestion, but a bit more formal and respectful while still making it abundantly clear that you are not actually going to do the thing that has been asked for)