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[1233312]

So - a common dilemma, I'm sure. I did a workshop paper last summer. Revised and submitted the thing to an amazingly slow journal. (As in, still no word, more than 9 months later.) Then just last week I found some law professor has posted a strikingly similar article to SSRN. (Law is not my field.) It's not a clear cut case of "this jerk obviously stole my ideas" because the framing and conclusion are different, but it contains quite similar evidence and let's say, a too-similar theoretical framework.

So, given that it was my mistake to submit it to that particular journal, and probably also to allow the PDF to stay online from the workshop, creating easy access for poaching, what should I do? I'm probably not going to bother to email the article to this person's dean -- no need to be that crazy -- but I am looking for reasonable suggestions that will not require too much time and will not mar my own reputation.

(I will say, vindictive creative strategies for amusement are encouraged -- not that I will follow them, but I could use a laugh about this.)

[bluezebracat]

This is always a terrible feeling to have.  But if you've been 'poached' by someone who's not in your field, and the conclusions and frame are different, why can't you still publish your work?

I'm not sure about your field, but in the humanities, it is pretty common for two (or more) people, working separately to end up working on the same topic but with different conclusions.  And for some people, say literature folks, it would be crazy not to expect 1 gazillion people to have written on Shakespeare, right?  So maybe there was no intentional poaching?  Still, whether or not there was mal intent, you probably feel violated.


The Year of Henry James is another real life version of this tale, but the guy got a book out of it.

But of course, it's quite different if you can prove that hu directly stole the details of an interview or your assay results and is passing it off as hus own.

[ggordon]

Did you post your pre-print on SSRN?  Having a date posted from SSRN allows you to stake a claim for your idea with a third-party verifiable date.  As noted above, ideas can be common but research is usually not.

At SSRN, we have had a couple of papers over the past 15 years that were very similar to other papers.  When we were notified of the similarities, we contacted all of the authors and they resolved the matter VERY quickly. If you need help or have any questions, you can contact SSRN at: authorsupport@ssrn.com or 877-SSRNhelp

[untenured]

Did you post your pre-print on SSRN?  Having a date posted from SSRN allows you to stake a claim for your idea with a third-party verifiable date.  As noted above, ideas can be common but research is usually not.

At SSRN, we have had a couple of papers over the past 15 years that were very similar to other papers.  When we were notified of the similarities, we contacted all of the authors and they resolved the matter VERY quickly. If you need help or have any questions, you can contact SSRN at: authorsupport@ssrn.com or 877-SSRNhelp

Assuming the moniker as accurate, you just received a response from Gregg Gordon, President and CEO of SSRN.  How the internet Gods managed to bless you with a response right from the top I will never know.  This is a reply you should take seriously.

I only have your post to go on, but I don't seen enough here to raise alarm.  The framing and conclusions are different.  The papers originate from different fields.  Sometimes interesting questions get addressed by multiple people concurrently.

Personally, I've had this happen to me two times.  The situation is not the same as yours as the two papers were ahead of mine in development were essentially asserting the same research claim as I was.  Each time I had through of the idea, the methodology, and results in a similar fashion independently of these papers.

This happens.  There are a lot of researchers out there working on similar material.

[ucprof]

In my field the originality of the work is timed from submission of the paper rather than publication.  Hopefully the journal you submitted to has a policy of publishing papers with the line "manuscript received on Jan 15, 2009, in revised form on April 10, 2010" or something like that.  If someone questions it after publication one can always point to the fact that you submitted yours first.  Also this sort of thing is grounds to contact the journal and tell them that people are now publishing related articles after yours on similar themes and thus they might want to get it published in a timely fashion.  In fact this happened to me with one of my own publications recently - we
did interdisciplinary work and wrote two manuscripts - one for each audience of the two disciplines.  The manuscipt for discipline #1 was submitted first, but it was also the more technical manuscript requiring longer reviewer time.  Manuscript #2 was accepted and published prior to manuscript #1 being accepted, and it gave us grounds to contact the journal for #1 and gently nudge people.  The tactic proved effective in our case.

[oldfullprof]

I had the opposite happen.  I happened to be doing a dissertation on the same topic as someone in another department at Austin.  She was a year ahead of me.  She suggested I use her lit review for my dissertation.  I strongly disliked her dissertation when I read it, and had no intention of using the lit review she'd generated.  I didn't.  Later, after I'd otained my PhD, she suggested we collaborate.  She turned out to be a psycho and way controlling, and began sending me angry e-mails appropos of nothing.  As lead author on our article, I fired her.  I had done 90 percent of the work on it.  I expunged her contributions, and published three realated things.

The powers that be had awarded her a dissertation award the year before I finished (I still think her diss was fairly bad qualitative research.)  This meant that mine had no chance to be considered because of the similarity of topics.  I don't really know if mine was all that good either, but, if hers won an award...