2 ms·
An old concern is that someone comes along, takes your data, and then a) shows that you have an error somewhere and disproves your paper, making you look stupi
by a_bonobo 10y ago
An old concern is that someone comes along, takes your data, and then
a) shows that you have an error somewhere and disproves your paper, making you look stupid, or
b) does something better with your data than your paper, making you look stupid, or
c) runs a follow up study on the same data you are currently running and publishes before you have the chance
In my experience usually none of this happens, UNLESS you're in a really cut-throat/hotly debated/bleeding edge corner of science, which is fairly rare.
c) is actually problematic if you told your funding body that you're going to generate X studies with the data they paid for, since you can only publish X-1 studies. I've seen this happen with biologists not releasing their genome assemblies with the assembly paper so they could run basic follow up studies using that assembly as reference before anyone else can do it.