We had a choice between cooperation or competition and you won't believe what happened next.

Issue 69: The story behind a recent paper--how we were forced to choose between competing with scientists doing similar research or cooperating with them

Being scooped to a discovery is a terrifying prospect for many scientists. This occurs when two research teams are racing to a discovery only to have one team publish their findings faster.

By one analysis, scooped papers receive about one-quarter fewer citations than papers that are the first to report the same discovery, and it can be very difficult to publish a scooped paper in a top academic journal. This incentive structure can make science feel like a dog-eat-dog occupation. The mere thought of getting scooped is enough to ruin the day for many scientists (as you can see in the comic below).

This is why it was a shock when Jay and his PhD student Claire Robertson received an email from the editors of Nature Human Behavior telling them that another research group had submitted an extremely similar paper. At the same time. Analyzing the same dataset. With nearly identical results.

This was a shocking coincidence and something we had never experienced—or even heard of before.

To make …