Towards Scaling External Feedback for Early-Stage Researchers: A Survey Study

Feedback on research artefacts from people beyond local research groups, such as researchers in online research communities, has the potential to bring in additional support for early-stage researchers and complementary viewpoints to research projects. While current literature has focused primarily on early-stage research seeking or getting support for research skills development in general, less is known about, more specifically, empirical understanding of how early-stage researchers exchange feedback with external researchers. In this paper, we focus on understanding the critical types of external feedback that early-stage researchers desire and the prevalent challenges they face with exchanging feedback with external helpers. We report on a large-scale survey conducted with early-stage researchers of diverse backgrounds. Our findings lay the empirical foundation for informing the designing of socio-technical systems for research feedback exchange.