> I think you should consider listening more to your supervisor. I know nothing about your field, but I've seen a lot of PhDs go off the rails because they chas

> I think you should consider listening more to your supervisor. I know nothing about your field, but I've seen a lot of PhDs go off the rails because they chased after something they thought was a great idea only to find it was a problem no one really cared about. Unfortunately only so much can be communicated in an online comment. I tried going into detail, but I'll leave it at this: I do listen to my advisor, but I disagree with him about how science is best done. > The incremental "find an open problem mentioned elsewhere and work on that for a while" isn't a bad way to start a PhD career. You learn a bunch about the field doing that. Reading your paragraph makes me think my point wasn't communicated clearly. I'm not arguing against working on open problems. I'm saying to make sure that the problem is actually open, and don't start doing expensive things like experiments without having a good idea of what you're doing. Given the existence of a large amount of archival literature, your great idea is likely to have been done already. There is value in reproducing previous experiments, but people should do new research too. > This seems an odd thing to complain about. Surely a PhD is all about peer review, and should be so. Peer review means people who know about the topic have reviewed it - how else should a PhD be done? For what it's worth I don't believe peer review as currently practiced in journals provides much value. The reviews tend to be superficial at best, and are provided far too late in the research process to have a strong influence on it. In my experience the reviews mostly help to make the paper more clear, and not because the reviewers give good suggestions on writing themselves, rather, because the reviewers seem confused about things I thought were written clearly. However, my advisor is definitely a strong believer in peer review as currently practiced. I mis-characterized him before. For him it's less "publishing in journals is the right thing to do" and more "publishing in journals provides a strong check on the work". In my view, the most important thing someone can do to improve their research is to be deeply critical of it. Unfortunately few people are critical of their own work. Getting feedback from others is valuable, but I believe that the best way to do so at present is to actively solicit it yourself, which is what I've been doing. Peer review in a journal should be the last step, not the only step aside from one's supervisor looking over the work. Also, I removed a paragraph about how I strongly dislike the current academic publishers. That's a major factor here as well. My field does not have good open access options at present. I'd really prefer to wait a few years as I think the landscape could change dramatically.