I had an awful feeling this might happen - my area is very specialised and whilst Ive got a number of conferences papers (over a few years) under my belt - someone else has beat me to it and published whats essentially the content of my introduction chapter (e.g oulines the topic, lit review, etc) in a decent journal. Ok, theres no data their end, but I still feel a bit cross with myself that I didnt prioritise time to try to publish earlier and make my mark.

In the absence of my supervisor, can someone reassure me?!:-(

Hi Rachael,

stay cool. If your area is in the picture, it is not surprising that someone else produces something similar. As you do not know what other people are doing, this cannot be influenced by you.

Regarding the actual research, obviously you can still complete and publish that, quoting that recent article (and other papers) regarding what they found and how this is in line or constrasting what you have found.

If you wanted to publish mainly on the literature review and exactly that has been published by this other person, then, I am afraid, it will be more difficult to publish that, especially in that same journal.

take a long good read of the article - you are bound to know more about the area - so why not alter your submission (when you do it) to critique the approach the other author has used. Or use it to demonstrate what he has missed out in his/her argument.

I had a heart leap moment when on google scholar a few weeks ago like this, but when I acutally read the article it was a load of rubbish!

Less than a year into my lengthy part-time PhD I discovered that there was a full-time student at another university who was doing an incredibly closely related topic. In fact his project moved closer to mine as he went on, and he completed successfully years before me, including moving on to publishing more articles than me. My supervisor reassured me that it was ok. Even if we were doing exactly the same topic - which we weren't quite, with some differences in approach, even if much of the evidence was the same - two separate approaches are perfectly valid, and my PhD wasn't in jeopardy. So think positive thoughts. It is a horrible shock when this happens, but it isn't the end of your PhD by a long chalk.

I think this must hapen quite a lot, but as long as you are not doing exactly the same thing, getting the same results, writing it up the same you should be OK, and you have data at least that's the impression I get. You just need a bit of originality when writing, for example although X has published Y about this, my approach looks at this aspect, which x has not covered, and/or which looks at y in a different way. Get hold of the article and check if it really is that close to your own before you do anything else, its probably not that similar :-)

Thank so much, feeling much less anxious now and able to move forward with positive action !