I have been in academia for about twenty-six years now, not counting the period of my PhD. That is long enough to have watched the same problems resurface, repackage themselves, and resurface again. Long enough to have developed opinions I can no longer be talked out of easily. And long enough to have grown genuinely and increasingly frustrated by a cluster of behaviours that the community tends to either name and ignore, or not name at all: the many ways in which intellectual credit fails to reach the people who earned it.
The most dramatic version of this has a name most researchers will recognise: scooping. It refers to the situation in which a researcher, or a group of researchers, publishes work that closely mirrors something you were already developing — sometimes arriving at the same conclusions, using similar methods, occasionally with near-identical framing — and does so before you. Science is a competitive enterprise, ideas are in the air, smart people in the same field often converge on the same problems at roughly the same time because they are exposed to the same literature and the same pressures. All of that is true. Independent parallel discovery is real and has a long, well-documented history.
But scooping is only the loudest version of the problem. The quieter versions may be more common, and in some ways more insidious, precisely because they are easier to excuse, easier to overlook, and easier to commit without ever quite deciding to. Failing to cite work you have clearly read. Publishing in a direction you know someone else was already heading, without acknowledgement. Reviewing a paper, recognising its value, and later finding that value useful to yourself. Blocking work from publication on the grounds that it is wrong — and then, years later, publishing the same idea. These things happen. They happen more than the community likes to admit. And they fall hardest on the people who can least absorb the blow: early-career researchers, PhD students, and those working outside the well-resourced groups that dominate the top of every field.
What I have started to question, more and more, is how much of this gets quietly rationalised as bad luck, competitive pressure, or innocent oversight — and how much of it is simply a failure to do the right thing. We live in an era of openness and connectivity. We post pre-prints before peer review. We present half-formed ideas at conferences. We have conversations with colleagues at workshops, over coffee, over email, where we share what we are working on because that is what intellectually honest people do. That openness is a good thing. I still believe that. But it creates exposure, and exposure, it turns out, is not without risk.
What follows are three situations I have been part of over the years. I want to be clear about what I am doing and what I am not doing. I have changed the research areas, the specific venues, and any details that would identify the individuals involved. The names do not matter. The patterns do. The aim is a plain one: to ask what the right thing to do actually looks like — and to invite people on both sides of these situations to reflect on that honestly.
The student and the reviewer
The first time this happened to me in an explicit way, I was still a relatively young academic with a PhD student who was working hard to find his footing. We had what felt like a genuine breakthrough: a new angle on a problem in our field that, at the time, very few people were looking at. My student pulled together some initial results into a short paper — the kind of modest, careful first publication that early researchers need, not to change the world, but to establish that they are in it, working, contributing.
The paper was submitted to a small but reputable venue. The review it received was enthusiastic. The reviewer praised the idea, noted its originality, and had little but positive things to say. As the programme chair of that event, I happened to know who the reviewer was — a prominent figure in the field, someone whose endorsement carried real weight. I told my student, without revealing the name, that the review had come from someone important. I wanted him to feel the confidence that comes from knowing that someone serious had looked at your work and found it worthwhile. The paper was published. We were pleased.
A few months later, a paper appeared in a high-profile journal, authored by that same prominent figure and their group. The topic was strikingly similar. The work was more complete, better resourced, more polished — as you would expect from an established group with the personnel and infrastructure that a lone PhD student simply does not have. My student, who had been preparing his journal manuscript, was devastated.
I wrote to the person. I explained that they had reviewed my student's work, that they therefore knew he was working in this direction, and that we would welcome the chance to collaborate. There was no response. No collaboration followed. No citation of my student's paper ever appeared. Because a PhD thesis requires demonstrable novelty, I had to make a formal submission to the university explaining that my student's paper predated the other group's work. The university confirmed the student could proceed. But I have never stopped asking the questions that situation left me with. Why not cite the earlier work? Why not reach out? Why not disclose, at minimum, that a conflict of interest existed before agreeing to review my student's paper, if you were working on the same idea? My student needed that acknowledgement far more than the prominent figure needed another publication. Science does not lose a thing from having an extra collaborator. It gains one.
The work that didn't exist
We talk constantly about standing on the shoulders of giants. It is one of those phrases that gets repeated so often it has lost most of its texture. But science does not only stand on giants. It stands on a scaffolding of smaller works — careful, often modestly cited papers that hold the structure together, that make the next step possible, that someone had to do first. What I find increasingly difficult to accept is how often that scaffolding is dismantled quietly, simply by being ignored.
My colleagues and I spent several years developing work on a particular socially significant problem — I will describe it here as using large-scale behavioural data to surface inequalities that were present in plain sight but had not yet been formally characterised. We were among the earliest groups working on this. We were careful to cite those who had come before us, even when their contribution was partial or preliminary. We published multiple papers over time, building on our own foundation, trying to do the work properly.
And then we began noticing something. Groups who published on the same topic after us — sometimes substantially after us — simply did not cite us. Not once. The chronology was not ambiguous. Our papers existed, were findable, had been published in well-regarded venues that no one in the field would describe as obscure, and they predated theirs. The omission was not an accident of ignorance. At one conference, a research group presented their work on exactly this topic. A researcher was delivering the presentation. At the end, when questions were invited, it became apparent — because I was in the room — that our work had not been mentioned. The acknowledgement came then, verbally, in the moment. I was grateful for it. But I could not stop thinking about the young researcher at the front of the room, who had presumably been told this was a new direction, who was building a career on the premise that their group had originated something they had not.
The researcher at the front of the room deserved to know the full picture. So did everyone in the audience. Accurate attribution is not a courtesy — it is how the scientific record stays honest.
The field they tried to stop us from entering, then entered themselves
This last case is the one that, to be honest, still makes me genuinely angry. I include it because it illustrates something beyond a single act of discourtesy — it illustrates how the suppression of inconvenient ideas and the failure to acknowledge prior work can compound over time into something that distorts an entire research area.
For a number of years, my colleagues and I worked on a methodological question in a computational field: specifically, whether a large family of approaches that had been proposed as distinct and independently innovative were, in fact, much more similar to one another than was being claimed. It was a question with real consequences, because the field had an incentive — institutional, reputational, and financial — to believe in the originality of each new proposal. We thought we could demonstrate, rigorously, that the differences were being overstated.
The reception from established figures in the field was hostile. Our papers were rejected. Reviewers — whose identities I either knew or could reasonably infer — argued that our method was flawed, that our conclusions were unfair, that we were wrong. With the benefit of time, I think the real objection was simpler: we were inconvenient. Some of the work we were labelling as insufficiently novel belonged to those same reviewers or their close collaborators. We did not give up. We found other venues, submitted elsewhere, and our work was published. The record exists. The dates are there. What happened next is precisely why that matters.
What followed over the next several years was this: the same people who had rejected our work began, gradually, to publish on precisely the same question we had raised. Without citation. Without acknowledgement. And eventually, when we submitted an extension of our own work — work that grew directly from the papers they had tried to prevent from existing — we received a rejection on the grounds that this territory had already been covered. By them.
I will leave the full absurdity of that to speak for itself.
There are other cases. I have chosen these three because they each represent something distinct: a failure of duty to a young researcher; a failure to acknowledge work that was inconvenient to ignore; and a systematic attempt to first suppress and then appropriate a line of inquiry. In every case, the work survived — it was published, it is findable, the dates do not lie. What did not survive, in some instances, were the people behind it. Early-career researchers who deserved to see their contributions recognised instead found themselves discouraged, passed over, and in some cases left academia altogether. The papers are still there. The researchers, in some cases, are not.
The pressures that produce this behaviour are real. Publish-or-perish is not a fiction. The metrics by which universities rank researchers and by which researchers judge one another are poorly designed and create perverse incentives. These are structures we are all operating within, and they matter.
Knowing why something happens does not make it right. A citation costs nothing. An acknowledgement costs nothing. Reaching out to a researcher whose work overlaps with yours — especially a younger one, especially one with fewer resources — costs an email. What these gestures signal, however, is everything: that you take seriously the idea that science is a collective enterprise, that priority matters, that the people who came before you deserve to be part of the conversation you are having because of them.
If you are reading this and you have been on the receiving end of any of what I have described: you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. If you are reading this and you recognise yourself, even partially, in any of these scenarios: it is not too late. The citation can still be added to your next paper. The email can still be sent. The collaboration can still be proposed.
Science does not become more rigorous by being more territorial. It becomes weaker. We can do better than this, and we already know how.