1/ Lit surveys and discovery exercises serve 2 purposes, not 1: providing idea fuel and containing downside of potential blindside errors
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2/ Conflating the two purposes leads to misery and terrible work because very different subsets of discovery findings drive them.
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3/ For idea fuel, you want to throw to choose from the ends of the distribution: most-cited and least-cited.
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5/ For the 2nd purpose of risk-containment, it's the middle of the distribution that matters. You'll illuminate your blindsides there.
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6/ If you look for both inspiration and risk mitigation in the middle, you'll do low-value, incremental work that is safe.
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Often it's not low-cited work that gives good starting points, but work that's highly-cited in some other (disconnected) community.
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Yes, I'd say the cross-pollination sub-category is possibly even the majority.
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A smoking gun for important papers: they're the first to co-cite two disparate literatures... 1/
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... but are then followed by lots of other papers that co-cite the same literatures. 2/
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