When I was in grad school, I can't recall a single time when I worried about getting scooped. Mostly because we were the only lab studying a particular protein using a particularly esoteric technique. So, the results were unique - we could look at things no one else was looking at. So much so that I didn't even know what the proper meaning of 'scooping' was. I thought it refers to a situation where someone learns what you are about to do and then does (publishes) it before you. It was only much later that I realized that it refers to the act of getting beaten to publishing something, whether or not the competing group knows what you are upto - so, it's competitive but not necessarily malicious.
On thinking about (and getting exposed to the risk of) getting scooped, one thing I realized is that, very often, it is not as bad as it is made out to be. Of course, not getting scooped at all may be ideal...but in reality, lots of people gravitate towards 'hot' topics, and one is bound to have competing groups working on similar problems more often than not. But it turns out that, most likely, different groups have different takes on the same problem. When I was writing my paper (from my postdoc work) several months ago, a paper (in a prominent journal) from another group came out that used a simple but key idea that we had also independently arrived at. But the 'flavors' of our problems and our attacks on them were quite different. The main result was also completely different. Some (well-intentioned) people, who falsely assumed that the key idea we implemented was all that there was to the work, told me that it was a setback for us. Later, it turned out that the reviewers didn't have the slightest concern that someone else had used a similar idea before. They focussed on the way we implemented the idea, what the results were and what it's implications were to the field. It even got accepted in the same journal.
I am no saint and I do have my concerns about getting scooped, but it appears that it is not as much as a setback as it's made out to be. The above does not apply to some studies like, say, publishing the genome of organism x or the mutation that is responsible for some disease. But even in those cases, it's not all or none. One can do a more rigorous analysis of the genome or something else that can make the paper really good, if not 'totally new'. At the end of the day, there is the risk of scooped. One can, may be, avoid people who are 'malicious scoopers' (if at all that is possible). Otherwise, I guess we just get scooped a little, inadvertently scoop a little, and enjoy the science.
