Consultant in a research project
I think I need some advice on how I should proceed in this particular situation.
I’m currently a PhD candidate and a few months ago I reached out to a prof in another university saying I was interested in her work- basically already eyeing a possible postdoc or research partnership. For context, she works with a tool that I want to use with the population I work with (we’re in humanities/healthcare research).
She was very happy to hear from me, set up a meeting and in this meeting she told me they were already thinking about working with this population, but didn’t have any experts on it (which I kind of am). She said she was going to develop a protocol for a pilot study with her team and get back to me.
This week she finally got back to me asking if I wanted to act as a consultant in the proposal. When I asked her to outline my duties specifically, she said my role would be limited to protocol/design consultation and referring participants (these are my kids that I work with in my research)- no data collection or subsequent data review.
I feel like I have so many questions because I think I was expecting to be involved in more than this “proposal review” part. This was literally a project that I was thinking of doing myself (this tool is publicly available any way), but I decided to reach out because I was hopeful of a partnership. For those who have experience acting as a constant, were you involved in any papers/output of the research? What are the real benefits for me accepting this? Does it make sense for me to feel like it’s a lil bit unfair that I won’t be part of it at all after the proposal review part, knowing that I was the one that reached out with the “idea”? Maybe they don’t see this way because apparently they already had this idea, but that’s how I feel. Are there any advantages for me to accept this at all?