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reading papers --> idea This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me. Ideas tend to come from working on real-world projects, which then s

reading papers --> idea This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me. Ideas tend to come from working on real-world projects, which then shows the lack of understanding and need for research. The project forks to do the research and merge back to implement the findings. Thereafter, someone on the team will put it into a cohesive academic format, and use it for a PhD. Of course there is reading papers and such, but it is not the source of the idea. edit: I am also curious, how many really stop research because a similar or tangential topic was explored? "There can be only one"?! that said, the game is fun! Thank you.

Frost1x 3y ago
I'd say this is where more engineering approachable ideas come from or ideas that might be considered translational (or near translational). If you work near the bridge of theory and application, this is probably more the case. A lot of funding agencies are pressuring even theoretical or basic research to look at translational application anymore though (capitalism is all about immediate ROI) so I'd say this is increasingly shifting towards many research domains but in the past, there were a lot of pure theoretical areas you could work on where there are plenty of unexplored ideas you could build out and get paid to do the work. Application is certainly a great driver though because you have a demand signal to look at vs throwing darts at the board in work that may never manifest to anything solid.
sweetjuly 3y ago
> This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me You might want to take a different approach to reading papers then. No paper ever concludes by saying "yeah our method is perfect and no further work is needed" [1]. Instead, every solution has its quirks and questions which need to be explored further. Maybe their method has limitations which make it unusable for your applications, maybe they make somewhat faulty assumptions that don't always hold, maybe they wrongly ignore some technique. Seeing how other people approach a problem can often give you inspiration for how to take it another way. [1] https://xkcd.com/2268/ https://xkcd.com/2268/

Frost1x 3y ago

I'd say this is where more engineering approachable ideas come from or ideas that might be considered translational (or near translational). If you work near the bridge of theory and application, this is probably more the case. A lot of funding agencies are pressuring even theoretical or basic research to look at translational application anymore though (capitalism is all about immediate ROI) so I'd say this is increasingly shifting towards many research domains but in the past, there were a lot of pure theoretical areas you could work on where there are plenty of unexplored ideas you could build out and get paid to do the work. Application is certainly a great driver though because you have a demand signal to look at vs throwing darts at the board in work that may never manifest to anything solid.

sweetjuly 3y ago

> This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me You might want to take a different approach to reading papers then. No paper ever concludes by saying "yeah our method is perfect and no further work is needed" [1]. Instead, every solution has its quirks and questions which need to be explored further. Maybe their method has limitations which make it unusable for your applications, maybe they make somewhat faulty assumptions that don't always hold, maybe they wrongly ignore some technique. Seeing how other people approach a problem can often give you inspiration for how to take it another way. [1] https://xkcd.com/2268/ https://xkcd.com/2268/