>why should PhD students do that work? I think there is some reasonable argument that replicating research is the first step to learning how to do good researc

>why should PhD students do that work? I think there is some reasonable argument that replicating research is the first step to learning how to do good research on your own. In an ideal world, PhD students should probably be trying to replicate similar work anyway and applying existing approaches own pet problem. In practice, many gloss over this because they are narrowly focused on doing something "new" so it can get published.