Discovering research has been done before?

[jendoly]

Anyone else had the incredibly heartbreaking experience of suddenly finding a paper or report that basically invalidates all of your research (either because it proves or disproves something related or just because it was the exact same topic you were researching)? How far along had you gotten? Was it new, or had you just missed it for whatever reason in your lit review?

[Henry Hudson]

A friend of mine (who posts here infrequently) arrived to start his MA on a certain topic; the same month of his arrival a book was published covering the exact same subject from the exact same approach. Luckily, it was early enough to switch topics.

[Eigen]

Thankfully, this hasn't happened to me yet.

It's more common in my field for results to be "scooped"... The area is pretty competitive, with lots of groups working on very similar work, so it's the "first one to publish gets the paper" type of situation.

[fuzzylogician]

There are several famous cases in my field in which different researchers reached the same (now widely accepted) results independently and at roughly the same time - say, within one year of each other. Usually one format of the conclusions is adopted (i.e. terms are borrowed from just one work) but everyone is cited for the idea. Nonetheless, it must be terrible to be out-published if you have worked on a topic for several years but you are still a year or so from publication - in that case I assume one must start over or at least add or change the current work, which no longer contributes anything new.

[starmaker]

Yes, this happened to me! Fortunately, it was a term research project for a class, rather than, say, a PhD dissertation that I was nearly done with.

In my case, it was someone having done the same work that I was planning to do. So I took the next step - I looked at their results and said "Well, here's a relevant thing that they didn't address - I will tackle this!" The professor let me take an incomplete, and gave me an A once I finished the project. I got a poster presentation at a conference, on which I got lots of compliments, out of it. It worked out fine in the end. I was very distressed about it at the time, though.

[msafiri]

Several times, I've thought I had this happen. The last one was about a month ago or so. Then, upon closely reading the paper (or in this case, master's thesis), I found the gaps in that study that my study was already planned to address. That was good, at least for me.

In the first year of my PhD, I read a book that basically summarized exactly what I wanted to do and at the site I wanted to go. I definitely looked for gaps, and found several, but then decided to go in another direction.

[StrangeLight]

i've seen people's dissertations and books scooped. the short-term fix was to read the new work, integrate it into the lit review, and criticize it (even if it was exactly what the person was going to do themselves). they come out harder against this work because they need to separate their project from the one that was just published.

the long-term fix is to recalibrate the entire project. either take a different slant, ask slightly different questions, or make it your mission to destroy the work that beat you to the press. the last approach rarely results in good scholarship, but it's difficult to walk away from a book-length project just because someone else wrote a very similar argument on the exact same subject. sucks, though.

[jendoly]

Upon really reading the work, the same thing as msafiri happened - found some gaps in the research and started to make a plan to address them. then, a proposal i wrote got a grant, so now i have to do what I proposed before this whole thing happened, which luckily falls into that "they didn't do that" camp. Phew.....