Stealing My Academic Thunder

Academics are constantly working against the clock to conduct quality research, draw inciteful conclusions and then spread their findings to the world. This process is an incredibly lengthy one and requires a lot of resources: funding, patience, manpower, data, and the trickiest of all, time. If you're lucky to get all of these things then that's great, if not the question must remain unanswered until somebody can gather all the resources together and get the work done.

Few questions and ideas are novel and if you've thought about it, the chances are that someone, somewhere in the world, has thought of it too. This means that you are up against the clock to reach the publishing finish line before these hypothetical competitors do. The race is on but you have no idea who your fellow competitors are and what checkpoint they have reached when you set off on your research journey and if they beat you too it, your cutting edge research quickly becomes blunt.

I think there is a perfect way to describe the feeling of discovering that someone has published in your  area that you are still working hard to complete. Even more so when you have found the same things, they've just got their first. They are 'stealing your thunder'; a phrase typically reserved for situations where you're supposed to be the centre of attention but someone upstages you, like your best friend announcing she's pregnant on your wedding day or someone announcing their engagement at your birthday party, but I feel it fits.

I'm sad to say this happened to me today. My academic thunder was well and truly stolen - not just by a fellow academic - but by the Government.

I've been conducting research on the practice of police officers in England and Wales, focusing on how they prepare victims and witnesses for giving evidence in court. Nothing like this had been done before, or should I say, nothing like this had been published before.

This morning I arrived at my desk to find an e-mail from my supervisor containing a press release and a copy of a report, jointly published on the 7th February 2012, by Her Majesty's Criminal Justice System Inspectorate and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary looking at the experiences of victims and witnesse in the criminal justice system...one aspect of this report was the area I'd focussed on in my study.

Thunder. Gone. My conclusions already there in print with someone elses name on them.

Being two large Government organisations they have obviously had a lot of co-operation from all aspects of the criminal justice system, they've had money to fund the research and they've probably had a large team of people collecting and analysing the data. I have, me, my computer and myself (and my supervisor of course). What chance did I have? If only I'd known what they were up to and I could have saved myself the time and effort and worked on something else...

My supervisor assures me that it's not a massive problem, I now have a great resource to reference, but I still feel short changed.

Will I ever beat the research clock? Who knows. Let the race continue.