I found that a method I was hoping to publish is already known. What would be a proper way to retract emails sent to professors asking for help?

2020-11-30

An answer to this question on the Academia Stack Exchange.

Question

Continuation of this post.

Basically, I emailed a publisher and two profs, asking for help on a paper I had written but not submitted. Turns out the method was not as novel as I thought, as an MSE post containing pretty much the same derivation was posted in 2016. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to break the news to them.

Off the top of my head, I considered saying "actually found it's been done before", but not sure how good that sounds. Probably this is as bad as I think it sounds, but any advice making it sound the best?

Answer

Answering somewhat generally. Having derived the method independently, you're now in the unique position of having all the necessary mental machinery to think deeply about the problem:

• Does the preexisting work leave gaps?
• Are there extensions to the approach?
• Are there alternative routes that would provide the same result. Sometimes it's useful to prove the same thing in many, many ways?
• Can you apply the technique to solve some applied problem?
• If the problem is computational, can you achieve better performance by substituting some components?
• If the problem is algorithmic did the previous authors release the source for their implementation? (If not, were they even doing science?) Venues like JOSS provide a place to get implementations reviewed, even if the method has already been published somewhere.