I can only speak to my personal experience here, I'm certainly not an expert in how effective PhDs across all disciplines are at pushing back the boundaries of

I can only speak to my personal experience here, I'm certainly not an expert in how effective PhDs across all disciplines are at pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. What's interesting is that the chemical reaction that was described in my paper that I linked elsewhere in this comment section [1] was originally discovered by some Japanese scientists in 1970, and we referred to their work as the "Oka Fragmentation". They too pushed back the boundaries of knowledge a little bit as well and we built on top of that. Also, my paper was arguing against conclusions made by a different team at Johns Hopkins - our work was ultimately shown to be correct as born out by subsequent experiments from our research group and others. So that contributes to the boundaries of knowledge by showing that some other body of work isn't correct. Who knows, perhaps our work will be shown to be incorrect in some future research. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's very difficult to discern impact at the time that you do the research - the impact can only truly be seen through the lens of history looking backwards. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja00151a001 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja00151a001