We say that someone is scooped when another person beats them to a result and publishes it first. I was scooped while working on my doctoral thesis, but I managed to keep my research on track. In this article I will share some good advice I received as well as some lessons I learned.

We say that someone is scooped when another person beats them to a result and publishes it first. I was scooped while working on my doctoral thesis, but I managed to keep my research on track. In this article I will share some good advice I received as well as some lessons I learned.

Early in grad school, I learned what it means to get scooped from a mathematician working for a software firm. He had dropped out of his doctoral program because he got scooped. I had heard of the term from journalism, but I was a bit shocked to hear that such a thing could happen to a graduate student in mathematics. I assumed that if that happened, you would at least be allowed to finish writing your thesis, even if you couldn't submit it to a journal. However, frequently a graduate student is told to find another topic. Graduate students who can't salvage something from their thesis research either start over or drop out.

About a year after I started working with my advisor on the problem he suggested for my thesis, I developed a specific formulation of the problem and a particular approach to solving it. I presented a thesis proposal at my orals, and the committee approved it. One month later, a team of two researchers at another university announced a solution to the problem and released a preprint. I was scooped. That same month, my advisor told me he was taking early retirement and moving to another city.

The graduate advisor discussed with me the possibility of finding a new advisor and/or a new thesis topic. I believed that I had a better approach to the problem and could find a more elegant solution, at least with respect to certain technical issues. Continuing to work on the problem appeared to be risky, but I had already invested a lot of effort and could not bear to let go.

The graduate advisor counseled me to “work off the abstract,” that is, to read only the abstract and not the whole preprint. He believed that I should read the statement of their results in order to know what I had to beat. By not learning their methods, I could best preserve the independence of my approach. He also suggested that since other researchers were working on the topic, the topic was probably important.

This strategy helped me to keep my research on track, and I developed a better solution to the problem. I made contact with those two researchers after I got my result, and they invited me to give a colloquium talk in their department. In the end, everything worked out, but my prospects did look bleak for a time. Here are some lessons I learned from the experience.

Lesson 1: Contact other researchers working in your area.

Don't assume your advisor knows who is pursuing what topics in your area of research. Those two researchers who scooped me learned about the topic from my advisor when he presented it as an open problem in a colloquium lecture he gave at their department the year before I entered graduate school. They never told my advisor they started working on the problem. My advisor never told me he had given the problem out to other researchers.

As part of your work to develop a thesis proposal, inquire around to see if anybody else is interested in the topic. Search arXiv.org and MathSciNet. Check abstracts from conferences in the field or AMS special sessions. Ask your advisor to suggest names of people to contact, and ask for help if you don't feel comfortable sending email to them yourself. Attending conferences and networking is one of the best ways to get this kind of information, but unless the conference is local, it's hard for a graduate student to get there.

If your advisor rarely attends conferences, then you need to work even harder at checking out a thesis topic.

Lesson 2: Work off the abstract.

If you've been scooped, first read only the abstract of a result published by a competitor. If you want to continue your research, establish an approach that will likely give a different or better result. Refrain from reading further into their paper until you need to understand their results in detail.

Lesson 3: Your advisor may not be supportive.

Your advisor may blame you for getting scooped because (he thinks) you didn't work hard or fast enough. Your advisor might also feel defensive when this happens if he recommended the topic and believes that the situation reflects poorly on him.

Lesson 4: Look for alternate projects.

When developing your thesis proposal and doing your research, pay attention to related questions or applications. You could develop an idea for a side project that might give you something to fall back on if you get scooped on your primary topic.

Let's hear from you!

As you might imagine, getting scooped is a difficult experience that can be hard to talk about. I hope that this article will stimulate some further discussion and exchange of ideas.

Have you or anyone you know been scooped? How did the situation get resolved? Post your experiences, stories and comments below (click on the Post a Comment link).