I spent about 20 years in academic and industrial research, and my firm belief is that almost nobody spends nearly enough time in the library. There have been hundreds of thousands of scientists before you; it is overwhelmingly likely that your hot new idea has been tried before. The hard part is finding it; science is made up of thousands of tiny communities that rarely talk to each other and use divergent terminology. But if you do the digging, you may find a paper from Egypt in 1983 that describes exactly why your project isn’t working (real example). Finding that paper two weeks into the project is much better than finding it five years later.
I spent about 20 years in academic and industrial research, and my firm belief is that almost nobody spends nearly enough time in the library. There have been hundreds of thousands of scientists before you; it is overwhelmingly likely that your hot new idea has been tried before. The hard part is finding it; science is made up of thousands of tiny communities that rarely talk to each other and use divergent terminology. But if you do the digging, you may find a paper from Egypt in 1983 that describes exactly why your project isn’t working (real example). Finding that paper two weeks into the project is much better than finding it five years later.