By Claire Robertson

Researchers live in fear of being “scooped.” Understandably so, as being “scooped” often means that hours, weeks, months, or even years of your hard work and scholarship have seemingly been wasted. So, imagine that after you've submitted your first paper, you receive an email from the editors of Nature Human Behavior telling you that another research group had submitted a similar paper at the same time, analyzing the same dataset, with more or less the same results. Furthermore, imagine you had submitted those manuscripts within three days of each other. And, even though your methods were different, both teams had found almost identical results.