In Science, There Should Be a Prize for Second Place
It is the moment that most scientists fear: You learn that your competitors have done similar experiments to those that have occupied the last years of your life, and have published the results before you. In the jargon of research, you have been scooped.
In science, there are few prizes for second place. Your chances of publishing your own work are now limited, since most major scientific journals put a premium on “novelty.” That is, they only want to publish things that are new, and they’ll often reject papers whose discoveries have already appeared elsewhere. For the scooper, glory. For the scoopee, heartbreak, and the tedium of revisiting past experiments to somehow make them seem fresh.
“You end up investing yet more time and resources into what was essentially a fully formed research story ready to be shared with
