Beyond that, you have to talk to people. At least in my field, there is an uncomfortable amount of cultural knowledge; many papers are known to be bunk, but ha

Beyond that, you have to talk to people. At least in my field, there is an uncomfortable amount of cultural knowledge; many papers are known to be bunk, but have not been retracted, or are otherwise compromised. You wouldn't know it from reading the literature but for a few carefully worded sentences when referencing some results. I maintain that the most important domain knowledge is understanding what evidence/methods are actually robust, and what just sounds nice. But yes, any research requires a lot of reading. If you don't like doing that (and ideally you really enjoy it) you're going to have a very tough time of it. You also won't have the background to have good conversations with people or to design experiments.