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I'm a masters student in mathematics and I gave a seminar talk about my main result. A professor in the audience gave a one sentence comment during my talk. It is an important comment about my work, which I didn't think of myself, and I added it to my paper (but did not yet send it for publication), including an acknowledgement to the aforementioned professor, specifying that this is "his" comment.

Is it unethical if I don't contact him to tell him I acknowledge him in the paper? For personal reasons, I would not like to be in any contact with this specific professor (because of his highly inappropriate behavior towards me in previous interactions, on which I did not take action because I have no proof.).

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  • Welcome to Academia SE. It seems to me that your question is already answered here. If yes, please close it as a duplicate (flag → should be closed → duplicate). If not, please edit your question to clarify or focus on what the existing Q&A doesn’t answer. – Wrzlprmft♦ May 20 '18 at 12:56
  • Yes, you are correct. The question is you linked to is not exactly the same as mine, but the answers do include an answer to my question. – Laure May 20 '18 at 13:02
  • @Laure: Is the sentence that important that it will improve the probability that the paper is accepted?If no, remove the sentence and don't acknowledge. Acknowledgements are for people who provided support, technical help or an idea used for implementation. Comments on the paper should not be included in the paper, unless they had impact on the rest of the paper. Attributing the sentence to a non-author of the paper will leave a weird impression anyway. – Sascha May 21 '18 at 5:23