[gabriel34]

Actually there are loads of scientific papers only reviewing other papers (usually a set of them), trying to infer conclusions and criticizing them on methodology and rigidity. Scientific careers advance both in quality and in quantity of papers published. Not everyone gets featured on Science or Nature.

[tga_d]

This is actually what I'm doing for my undergrad senior thesis right now. It's in theory-heavy CS, but there are some results that are based on some moderately difficult math, and experimental evidence of those results, which I'm independently verifying. So, it seems to apply. It's not the most exciting thing to be doing in the field, but it's more interesting than most of my other classes, and can be used for later work.