> The main distinction I see between "research" and "tinkering" is not what the author calls "scholarship". From personal experience the only serious distinctio

> The main distinction I see between "research" and "tinkering" is not what the author calls "scholarship". From personal experience the only serious distinction is that "researchers" tend to have a very long time attention span compared with "tinkerers". Many aspects of "scholarship" become inevitable when "tinkering over a long timeframe". You build up a knowledge base about the problem and/or methodology you're tinkering with, you eventually form a community around your tinkering, etc. Lots and lots of tinkerers gratify themselves without contributing any modicum of knowledge to the world. But the most successful tinkerers are almost always effectively scholars in the sense of this post. In the sense that they're familiar with a body of knowledge/the people producing that knowledge. And they contribute genuinely new ways of doing things, or new ideas of things to do, or excellent executions on existing ideas that achieve the aspirations of previously articulated ideas. E.g., Linus is certainly a successful OS scholar in the sense of this post. > In the case of very successful articles, you can fit all the readers in a (small) bus This is off by at least an order of magnitude for any even remotely reasonable definition of "successful". > Researcher B reads what researcher A reports and expresses an opinion, just like any honest reader could First, the author explicitly kinda-sorta agrees with you here (...Third, it's not really the publication...), so it's pretty clear that publication venue != scholarship. As an aside, peer review != validation!!! This is something that every young Ph.D. should explicitly learn early on.