In 1884, Gregor Mendel, one of the fathers of modern genetics, died without recognition for his work. In doing so he entered the class of scientists who changed the way we view the world, but died without any significant recognition of their work. Fast forward to the 21st century, and the same dynamic plays out - we have a hard time recognizing where good science is. The most telling example from recent times is Katalin Karikó, 2024 Nobel Prize Laureate, whose struggles to find funding for her work on mRNA are well-described in scientific journalism. ¹ If this is not solid enough documentation that we have bad metrics for measuring what constitutes “good” research, I don’t know what is. However, we can be sure that if Karikó had changed her research area to whatever was getting grants in the 1990s, we would now be missing one of the newest biotechnologies in our arsenal for fighting infectious disease.

In research labs across the world, there’s very often worries about being “poached”. Getting “poached” is a bit of a loose term, but basically, it means that someone else is doing the same research as you, getting the same (or better) results, and publishing before you. Then, if you try to publish your own results, they don’t stand out as original - in the best case, you do more experiments and change your angle a little, but in the worst case, they don’t get published at all, and your work is deemed moot. This is a common fear in research groups working in narrow fields with a lot of competition. Basically, we have a feedback loop:

1. A field grows in popularity. This can happen at random, for many different reasons; maybe a seminal paper comes out, or a new technology is launched (looking at you, ChatGPT), or a new disease is spreading rapidly.
2. The importance of this research is emphasized, and more researchers flock to the field
3. More researchers publish new articles and reviews, which means that the original papers get more citations.
4. Citation inertia sets in, as highly cited researchers get more grants to work in the field.

There are obviously positive effects to fields growing, but we can’t forget the value of basic research, which is how new fields are created in the first place. Additionally, if you’re doing cutting-edge work, your most recent publications won’t show what you’re working on now, but rather what you worked on a year ago. Therefore, if you’re going into a field because it’s hot, you’ll always be one step behind. ² Finding a niche will be easier in a field you already know - but exploring that is for another essay.