Leonid Tiokhin, a metascientist at Eindhoven University of Technology, learned early on to fear being scooped. He recalls emails from his undergraduate adviser that stressed the importance of being first to publish: “We’d better hurry, we’d better rush.”

A new analysis by Tiokhin and his colleagues demonstrates how risky that competition is for science. Rewarding researchers who publish first pushes them to cut corners, their model shows. And although some proposed reforms in science might help, the model suggests others could unintentionally exacerbate the problem.

Tiokhin’s team is not the first to make the argument that competition poses risks to science, says Paul Smaldino, a cognitive scientist at the University of California (UC), Merced, who was not involved in the research. But the model is the first to use details that explore precisely how those risks play out, he says. “I think that’s very powerful.”

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