As a PhD student, learning to navigate the murky waters of collaboration and competition is pretty confusing. I recently attended my first conference — and never mind the name badges, I wanted to tattoo 'FRIEND' or 'FOE' on people's foreheads. Given that a researcher's publications are often months, if not years, behind their current lab work, it is hard to discover who is working on what. Knowing when to share unpublished ideas and when to practise your poker face can be a nightmare for an early-career scientist.

Why is it so hard? One reason is that science is a truly integrated discipline: completely independent fields are rare. As multiple groups generate data around the world, hypotheses evolve, and the direction of a scientist's research can change. One group's work might bleed into another's field of interest. So when two labs find their investigations becoming a bit too close for comfort, how do they decide whether to collaborate or compete?

Collaborations can be brilliant. Bringing together different skills and expertise offers fresh insight into old challenges and opens up new avenues of research. However, sharing a research theme does not always result in happy scientist families. Competition can overshadow the collaborative spirit and hinder progress.

Of course, competition is essential to science. It can stimulate motivation and productivity for labs addressing the same questions with conflicting hypotheses: the opportunity to deliver a scientific 'I told you so' is an appealing incentive. Healthy rivalry keeps fields exciting and ensures that all angles of research questions are considered.

Credit: J. TOE/SHUTTERSTOCK

However, when different groups are testing the same hypothesis, the contest is often simply a race to publication. The group that wins increases its citation number and strengthens its reputation. But does this justify the duplicated data, man hours and, potentially, taxpayers' money? In the current economic climate, I find it hard to understand how this style of competition remains prevalent.

There is at least one intermediate path between collaboration and competition: labs can coordinate publications. Instead of rushing through projects in parallel, they can agree to submit simultaneously and address a complementary range of questions. Without the time pressure, compromises in research quality are reduced. Ultimately, the journal audience can read a far more comprehensive story.

But many labs continue to jealously guard their progress and sacrifice paper quality for personal recognition. Should such egotism be acceptable in science, the main aims of which are, ideally, discovery and innovation, rather than accolades for its practitioners? As a young researcher, I am puzzled that a community reliant on integrity and transparency is tolerant of lies and misdirection in the publications race.

That said, I'm not sure it would be prudent to advise young scientists always to speak freely at conferences and discard the poker face. Unless every person in the room does the same thing, you will eventually get scooped. As physicist Max Planck once wrote, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”. Young scientists will have a crucial role in establishing a culture of greater cooperation amid a global scientific enterprise increasingly populated with far-flung collaborations. But we also need to recognize the importance of a bit of competition — and the reality that researchers will probably always be on the lookout for both friend and foe.