Oh NO!!!!
"Somebody at the University of Wherever has just finished a dissertation on My Topic!"
I think we are all familiar with that nightmare scenario.
SO, go to http://www.phddata.org
, register your topic, and browse to see what other people are doing.
(There are some indexes like this already, for instance the one on the AHA site, but that of course only covers
1. Historians 2. Who are AHA members 3. Who are in North America)
It is common, in the humanities it seems much more than the sciences - which by their nature tend to be more collaborative - for people to be very secretive about their work. The fear of being ripped off by a colleague is a curiously vivid one, I say curious because the instances I have heard of are incredibly rare. It is this type of fear that stops people listing their topics or abstracts in indexes, when in fact it should do the reverse - such an index could serve to prove priority on a topic if there were any dispute. The ideal would be a compulsory index, which would surely solve all such problems. Not knowing in 1922 that an academic on the other side of the world was working on the same topic is understandable, not knowing now seems ridiculous.
I think we are all familiar with that nightmare scenario.
SO, go to http://www.phddata.org
, register your topic, and browse to see what other people are doing.
(There are some indexes like this already, for instance the one on the AHA site, but that of course only covers
1. Historians 2. Who are AHA members 3. Who are in North America)
It is common, in the humanities it seems much more than the sciences - which by their nature tend to be more collaborative - for people to be very secretive about their work. The fear of being ripped off by a colleague is a curiously vivid one, I say curious because the instances I have heard of are incredibly rare. It is this type of fear that stops people listing their topics or abstracts in indexes, when in fact it should do the reverse - such an index could serve to prove priority on a topic if there were any dispute. The ideal would be a compulsory index, which would surely solve all such problems. Not knowing in 1922 that an academic on the other side of the world was working on the same topic is understandable, not knowing now seems ridiculous.
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