I'm a CS professor, so I've a fair bit of experience publishing research. A few things to think about: It's easy to publish research, but the first lesson is

I'm a CS professor, so I've a fair bit of experience publishing research. A few things to think about: It's easy to publish research, but the first lesson is that the places it's easy to publish in, no-one will read your research. I was one of the authors of DHTs back in 2001. That paper has clocked up nearly 10000 citations over 16 years. That's a 16 year mean of around 2 citations per day, and that's just one paper! It should be clear that the total number of CS papers published is huge. It's likely that many of those papers will almost never be read. If you want your research to have any influence on people you need to publish in places that are not easy to publish in. The second lesson is that the hardest part of doing good research is coming up with a good problem. There are three parts to a good problem: it must be solvable with the resources you have, it must not have already been solved well enough, and people must care if you succeed in solving it. I see people fail on all these three, but especially the third. "Make something people want" applies to research as much as to startups. Knowing what will be a good problem is hard without people around you to guide your problem taste, and even then it's hard. Rejection letters from conferences and journals rarely say the biggest problem with your work was that it wasn't interesting; you have to read between the lines if this is what the feedback should have been. Most people think that the hardest part of research is coming up with a good solution, but usually this ends up being the easiest part. If you find a novel question and really understand it well, solutions tend to present themselves. The third lesson is that evaluation is hard. Usually harder than coming up with a good solution. I've never yet met a new PhD student who could devise a good experiment plan, and properly interpret the results. It's just not something that is taught properly in schools or at the undergrad level. It's all too easy to evaluate what you can evaluate, not what you should evaluate, or to only run experiments to confirm what you think you already know. You should be looking hard to convince yourself that you're wrong (you often will be), and only when you've failed to convince yourself you're wrong, will you have a convincing evaluation. Good PhD students eventually learn how to do this, mostly by osmosis from their advisor. Some fail to learn this even then. As an independent researcher not surrounded by people asking critical questions, you'll likely struggle on this part.