Background: Masters student conducting a research project with 3 supervisors within my university.
My supervisors are fantastic, but they do not have expertise in a very specific type of analysis which I am conducting. I want to bring in a researcher who has written multiple seminal papers in this type of analysis.
1) is this considered rude? I am alright part way through my project
2) is it common to have supervisors who are not at your university, and would likely never meet? If so, what exactly is their incentive to help?
Comments
I recommend being very careful.
Outside researcher basically has no incentive. Supervising a master’s student is yet another task for them, and one that is unlikely to have any benefit to them (sorry). The researcher is probably very busy and will most likely decline. And in any case you shouldn’t reach out to them without discussing this with your current supervisors first, as the outside researcher most definitely won’t agree to help you if there is any hint that your supervisors may not be on board.
Requesting another supervisor can be offensive, but this really depends on how you word it. You could carefully suggest at a meeting that you’d love to learn more about the specific type of analysis, and that you wonder whether it would be possible to get help from the outside researcher? And then see how they respond.