Counterpoint (sort of; maybe more of a juxtaposition):
I am aware of at least one academic field where, from the outside, the work looks very original; and from the inside, it also looks original—and this is a bad thing, because the demand that all research should be “novel” largely prevents the field from doing useful work, from developing a corpus of established knowledge and robust models, from developing clever ideas into truly useful and comprehensive solutions to real problems…
To put this vague complaint into perspective: in the field in question, approximately 3% of published papers are replications. 3%! Needless to say, the journals and conference proceedings are littered with abandoned, barely formed ideas and with repeated reinventions of half-baked wheels that’ve been invented before a dozen times, but slightly differently, and never built up into anything except “proofs of novel concepts”…
This is the true price of chasing “originality” and “novelty”!
Counterpoint (sort of; maybe more of a juxtaposition):
I am aware of at least one academic field where, from the outside, the work looks very original; and from the inside, it also looks original—and this is a bad thing, because the demand that all research should be “novel” largely prevents the field from doing useful work, from developing a corpus of established knowledge and robust models, from developing clever ideas into truly useful and comprehensive solutions to real problems…
To put this vague complaint into perspective: in the field in question, approximately 3% of published papers are replications. 3%! Needless to say, the journals and conference proceedings are littered with abandoned, barely formed ideas and with repeated reinventions of half-baked wheels that’ve been invented before a dozen times, but slightly differently, and never built up into anything except “proofs of novel concepts”…
This is the true price of chasing “originality” and “novelty”!