Comment by dahart

I’m lucky enough to have had opportunity and encouragement to do research most of my career, and work closely with other researchers for decades.

The first job of a researcher is to understand what others have done, before attempting discovery. Failure to do that critical step means it’s not considered research. The second job is to build on the work of others. And the third job is to communicate those results to others. Discovery is the seeking of knowledge, which is education. Framing it as self-education is feeding a narrative of research as being an individual sport, but in reality research is entirely a collaborative team sport with incremental dependent results.