>It's fully possible for individuals to self teach in a working environment and be capable of performing effective research with 2-4 years of good experience af

>It's fully possible for individuals to self teach in a working environment and be capable of performing effective research with 2-4 years of good experience after undergrad. It's technically possible, but it's unrealistic. The work that is published in journals often demonstrates results that are known by the community years before the actual publication. There's effectively a "secret club" in many disciplines that you need to have connections to in order to actually understand the current state-of-the-art. Without those connections, it's hard to understand what is high-impact and meaningful. This means the research you would do is likely to be insignificant, or already done and pending publication. An easy way to avoid this is to start attending conferences and working with establishment players, which is exactly what doing a PhD entails.