> One thing I'd note is that before that Internet era, the scholarship needed to discover who had done X previously took a really significant amount of time. Th

> One thing I'd note is that before that Internet era, the scholarship needed to discover who had done X previously took a really significant amount of time. The Internet has changed that a lot It's exactly the opposite. You can now spend years just reading all the recent papers relevant to a quite specific topic of interest, and 20-80% of your time keeping up with new results. If you narrow your research so much it's manageable you're immediately rejecting lots of directions right from the start.