When a colleague with shaky data raced a competitor to be first to publish, I saw how the perverse incentives in research work
There’s an oft-repeated phrase in the scientific world that “competition drives innovation”. This can definitely sometimes be true, but in my experience the reality most of the time is that competition can be hugely wasteful and damaging to research.
Take our lab, where we work in several high-profile areas. We’re aware that we have several major competitors around the world. We want to be first, we need to be first and we must keep it secret. Doing this can make or break a career, or decide a grant application outcome. It can even shape the future direction of the field.
One recent experience throws into sharp relief the dangers of our competitive scientific environment. At one of our regular update meetings a lab member showed their most recent results and explained how they were obtained. But we weren’t quite convinced: the data wasn’t really solid, the analysis not quite complete and the proposed model lacked support. We made our suggestions and moved on.
Within a week, we had heard rumours that one of our competitors had submitted a very similar paper on the same topic. By the following our manuscript was written, and within a few days it was submitted. A short time later it was published. Our lab wasn’t first, but we weren’t really second either. You’d think everyone would have been happy.
