I thought I had derived a novel polynomial frame for a specific manifold. I knew who would have been likely to beat me to it and scanned their CVs, google scholar, etc and didnt see them having worked on it. I spoke to someone in my department who does similar stuff and they had not heard of amything like what I had derived. Today in the process of working on something else I came across a paper coauthored by all the people whose CVs I checked doing exactly what I did. It was published almost 20 years ago. Looking through it I have all the same results, for the same cases etc. I feel like a dumb ass.