The "Problem" of Similar Work

One problem that many graduate students face is that they have started on a project and then discover a book or article that is very close to what they have done.

Recently I received an email that said: “I have just found a book that makes a large number of the same arguments I was planning to make. I am having a bit of a rethink on my basic proposal, and will take longer than I planned.” I think the “will take longer” part of this is one of the most common stumbling blocks, and I think it can be generally resolved by looking at the similar work differently.

If you want to do original work, finding a work similar to what you intended can be seen as a block, as something that prevents you from doing what you wanted because what you wanted to do will no longer be original. There is, possibly, some loss in prestige in following work that someone else has already done, but this does not prevent you from doing original work that supplements or complements the already-published work. But finishing a project is a primary concern, and the existence of a published work that is very similar to what you hoped to do is actually a boon in terms of designing a project and getting it accepted.

Every similarity with some other work is something that you can cite in support of your own work. Instead of asserting a point yourself, you can make that assertion in combination with a citation, which makes the assertion more acceptable to most academic readers. The greater the similarity, the greater the strength of the foundation for your own work. When you read a work that is similar to yours, you can profit from that work if you can find one question about the work that you can turn into a good research project that you would be willing to do.

All scholarly works have some limits—some conclusion that may have interesting unexamined implications, some premise that had been defended or explained poorly, some side issue that hasn’t been examined, some point where you disagree with the work. All you have to do is find one place where you think the work is limited, and you can do some sort of study that addresses the limitation. There are even times when attempting to replicate an experiment or study can be valuable.

If you can find such a single point, you can build a study using the same theoretical framework as the work that was similar to what you wanted to do, which saves you a lot of working in explaining the motivations and theoretical foundations of your own project (which are often stumbling blocks).

When you use a lot of a specific work, you can get the additional rhetorical benefit of speaking positively of other scholars: you present your work as an attempt to cooperate with and build on work that you respect. If you frame your work in that positive cooperative relationship with the similar work, you will not be perceived as contrarian, even if you do choose to challenge one aspect of the similar work.