Social science contains is an extremely large range of things being studies. There are all these pockets of work that is being done that it can seem that it would be unlikely to run into do something identical to you.
I was walking in Boston when I was at the Academy of Management a few years ago. I stopped to chat with 2 PhD students from the Netherlands who had been at a session I had also just attended. As I talked to one student I gave a short summary of what I had been working on: "transactive memory and how structure of communication affects TMS formation." The one student mentions that her partner was studying something else involving TMS. Her topic was "How the structure of a group influences the usefulness of the TMS". Not the same question, but really very similar. It was in one way nice to somewhat randomly meet someone with such a similar topic but in another way, I felt uneasy, like this person was my competition.
The outward view of much of science seems to be that scientists are extremely collaborative, share ideas freely, and learn from one another. This is, in one way, an ideal that many strive for, but it is in another very real way the antithesis of how some of science is structured. In a recent episode of Cosmos, Neil Degrasse Tyson explained this relationship as a great lineage of student and teacher, learning and expanding our overall knowledge. Though I couldn't quite identify it, something in his statement seemed very dissimilar from aspects on my own experience.
Within social science, possibly because there is so much space to explore, I sometimes feel very protective of my little niche. I don't want anyone to come in and publish papers similar to these ideas I have before me. One reason for that is that the more publishing in an area, the more prior material that you have to read and account for in your own paper or design. Second, if you are the first with an idea, it can be helpful in increasing your citations or just your general recognition. I don't know if this protectiveness exists in other areas of science but it is something I personally feel.
The other day a professor suggested I read a paper due to my interests. Though they go about their theorizing and methods differently than I would, they were essentially interested in the same primary question I have in my dissertation. Thankfully, I think that this paper informs mine more than replaces it but I was scared when I looked at it. My thoughts were "Oh no, if this is what I think it is, will there still be room in the literature for my research?"
There have been potential solutions for this problem raised for years within social psychology. Van Maanen and Pfeffer had an argument in a journal over a series of articles. Pfeffer was essentially suggesting that a small set of scientists should determine what the important questions are. Then all the researchers that do that kind of work (or all researchers) would pursue answering that question thoroughly. This directed approach, he called paradigm consensus, seems similar to some pushes in other sciences such as the recent push in Physics to identify the Higgs Boson.
Van Maanen made some cogent arguments against this (primarily about how the 'taste-makers' will be chosen in a field that retains some element of subjectivity). The title of his response "Fear and Loathing in Organization Studies" is particularly witty I felt. In the current model where it is a bit of a free for all, then some of us are put in this funny position that work that takes a long time to complete is successively more dangerous because someone else might get there before you. Replications are not highly valued in Social Psych either leading to some bogus concepts sticking around for much longer than they should.
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