Graduate students have like four good years of research time. If your work is scooped it will almost guarantee low citation counts but very likely it means that the work cannot be published at all. A year down the drain.

If you want a faculty position after graduation you've got one shot to create a strong research profile. Getting scooped once can close career doors forever.

People also often don't understand what grad students do. They do all of the research. 100% of it. PIs are funding the lab and providing mentorship. The first authors on major groundbreaking papers are usually grad students.

In some ways the graduate student is working on the most important work of their career. A PhD requires novel publications and if you get scooped on the main result of your thesis so that you don’t end up with the published paper on that topic very few organizations will grant the PhD. So this can result in losing out on getting a degree you put five years of your life into.

Being first is almost everything -- the product in academic research is new knowledge.

How much press was given to the second time the LHC discovered the Higgs, with higher precision?

Robert Dicke, in the running for "greatest experimental physicist in history", was working rapidly toward discovering the cosmic microwave background, with a keen physical insights driving the research. His team was beaten by a team at Bell Labs, who, when they discovered an irreducible isotropic source of noise emanating from the Universe, literally called Dicke [1] to help them understand the signal.

Who got the Nobel Prize? The team from Bell Labs. Never mind that Dicke literally wrote the companion paper explaining why the Bell Labs measurement was so important. Why? Because they were first.

Regarding graduate students: It is extremely common in physics to have the lead author (and coordinator) on important/cutting-edge research be a graduate student. It is only the largest collaborations where this isn't always the case.

Graduate students tend to follow a single thread of research from beginning to end, learning the ropes on the way, while faculty generally manage and mentor multiple threads (each with a student) simultaneously. When it comes time to publish, frequently it is the student who knows all of the details of the measurement the best.

For your final question, the answer goes back to "because being first is almost everything", combined with "we have to give the credit to somebody, right?". If someone notices that the eighth word on 50% of Guinness World Record citations is "person", should the credit for the discovery go to the person who noticed that interesting fact, or should it primarily go to Guinness World Records, who assembled and produced the dataset over decades of work?

Or, more-concretely, when someone applies for and receives fifteen minutes of time on the Hubble Telescope and, using a clever time-domain analysis, happens to find a repeating optical signal that blinks 13 times, then 53 times, then 13 times, then 53 times (as good a SETI candidate as you'll find), who gets the credit? Is it the researcher with the keen insight and good luck, or is it the huge amalgamation of humanity, spanning a half-century of science and engineering, that made such a measurement possible?

[1] https://theconversation.com/the-cmb-how-an-accidental-discov....

So, the caveat to all of this is I'm actually in a field (epidemiology) where getting scooped matters less in many cases than it does for some others (math).

Getting scooped doesn't just matter for high profile discoveries. The example I was thinking of is the graduate student's research asking "Does this thing the field is doing make sense?"

That's a Yes or No answer. There's not a lot of interest once the question has been answered. Even if it can be published, it'll be a harder road, potentially finding itself in a less prestigious journal, etc. At worst, it's a write-off. Most graduate students are coming out with 2 or 3 paper dissertations, so the loss of one, or taking a hit on another one, can set someone behind, dramatically change the tenor of their job search, etc.

"And to be clear, I'm not downplaying the importance of anyones contributions, but rather why the focus isn't shifted onto where data is sourced from? If someone used your data, shouldn't it be immediately obvious if they also have data publishing requirements? And if thats true, why isn't it a bigger faux pas to use another labs data before that lab has even published their paper on it?"

I mean, it might not be the only thing that's been published on that data - that's the point. Once it's publicly available, it's publicly available, even if people are still working on it.

Indeed, one of the "Data is available upon reasonable request" things is "We have a student working on this, could you not?" (another being "You're a crank, and we're not sending you this to misinterpret/misuse it"), but a lot of open data folks actively dislike that for obvious reasons.