[wiresurfer]

This is not entirely true. Speaking from my rather long sojourn with CS Research in an industrial research lab setting. While it helps to start out with researchers, many fields of CS research are as much individual pursuits as they are a team effort. If you have a network of domain experts you can communicate with, and access to publications, a sufficiently motivated person can definitely make inroads into research. A couple of other points to be noted, 1. open access to publications is still a utopian dream. Being affiliated with an organization or academic institution gives you access. 2. Infrastructure and Equipment is something you will have to arrange yourself if you want to do things on your own. This is prohibitive when it comes to the latest and greatest in deep learning, or systems engineering or anything biomedical. 3. Data. Organizations have access to data. period. Or atleast can arrange access to data. 4. It helps to have more hands on deck. So working in teams can accelerate the pace of your results.

Some fields which are conducive to lone work would be around cryptography, algorithms, essentially anything theoretical CS. or fields like ICTD where its less about a break through and more about a novel application.

ps: this is a very CS perspective.