Honestly, that's still far too much help in lots of cases. Finding a set of papers, whose results can be combined in a reasonable amount of time to make a new

Honestly, that's still far too much help in lots of cases. Finding a set of papers, whose results can be combined in a reasonable amount of time to make a new interesting result is itself a hard problem. This is often a thing Professors do for PhD students -- give them a general area to research and some papers to start reading. It's still a contribution, but so much easier than just asking "Hey, choose a set of papers from which you can derive new interesting results"