Tamsen Webster explains why it's good news when someone has already studied your topic. You can replicate their results, critique their methods, or use their work to explore related questions you care about.
When you find other people who have studied a very similar, if not the same thing as you, that's good news. That means you're onto something. It means that you can redo, replicate what they've already done to see if you get the same results. Or you can look at what they've done and go, I don't agree with what they were doing, how or why. Or you can say to yourself, interesting that they found that, but what about this other thing?
