[jhbadger]

I happen to actually be a a computational biologist whose work could be considered "esoteric and technical" and whose papers are only fully understood by others in my field. But the fact is every paper of mine (and everybody else's) has 50 to 100 references. Because research is pretty much just reusing existing knowledge in the papers cited. The main source of "innovation", if it can be called that, is taking an idea from another field and applying it to your own. The idea of a scientist or inventor who comes up with an idea completely out the blue with no context is common in fiction, but that isn't how it works in reality.