>>14370024>You just do, you learn, you study and that's it.No, that's wrong. Without context, goals and engagement with a research community your "research" is utterly worhtless mental masturbation. I've seen the ugliness of this countless times with subpar gradstudents (especially from the third world, not to offend, but to warn) and they all think they are onto something great when the work they do has actually already been done, or is some trivial rederivation of an undergrad textbook formula. This is nearly always from students who self-study complex topics and misapply them to simpler problems under advisers who don't have the expertise in the field to tell them to stop wasting time and money.
This isolated mental masturbation of "passionate" researchers who do bad research has destroyed countless careers, lives and marriages. And the sad thing is that it's not that they struggle to communicate their research, it's that their research is worthless and/or not novel/reproducible and everyone is too polite to tell them that.
> You don't sit around trying to gain citations.This is honestly a far, far better guideline to doing something that actually novel and useful to society. A lot of people far smarter than you have explored countless areas of research, and usually (but not always) the high impact fields are where the most important problems are. There are also stagnant/low impact fields that nevertheless work on important questions. The criteria for these are simple; are they getting funded or not. Can YOU get that funding?
It's honestly a fundamentally disgusting and selfish arrogance to start working in some corner on something you think is important without impact in mind. You are saying you know better than every living researcher; you don't.
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