[abdullahkhalids]

> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it

This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.

[bennettnate5]

The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!

[1718627440]

Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.

[jacinda]

It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.

Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.

Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.

[Apocryphon]

And here we once again see an example of misaligned incentives baked into another one of our most hallowed institutions.

[antonvs]

The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.

It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”

[majormajor]

> The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.

> It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”

Or are they trying to require enough rigor and discipline so that out of 100,000 people who want to be the next Einstein, the process washes out the 99,000 who aren't willing or able to do more than throw out half-baked 'creative' ideas and expect the world to pick them up and run with them.

There's only finite attention and money for funding research, so you gotta do SOMETHING to filter out the larpers who want to take it and faff around.

I think at this point the system has eaten its own tail a bit, but there's good reason to require some level of "show me" before getting given the money to run your own research.

[Xirdus]

For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?

[1718627440]

My imagination was leaning more into the educational side than the research side of university. I see how that wouldn't be appreciated by a patron, but when you get search grants, isn't the topic discussed before starting and paying for the research? Also that is kind of the point, why topics are cleared with the chair-holding professor, which is expected to be already experienced in the subject to know where the knowledge needs to be expanded.

[jcelerier]

Well, if you don't care about not being able to do your defense after 4 years of work because someone managed to do it just before you..

[ChromaticPanic]

Unless you're already an expert in the topic a literature search is literally step 1 since you have to check if your idea has already been done before.

[abdullahkhalids]

That's where your supervisor comes in. In most cases, they should be an expert in the field, and guide you towards a useful and novel problem.

Moreover, I am not suggesting you don't look at other papers at all. But google scholar and some quick skimming of abstracts and papers you find should suffice to check if someone has already done the work. If you start fully reading more than a handful of papers, your ideas are already locked in by what others have done, and it becomes way harder to produce something novel.