I was really impressed by the scale of the lacuna tool you created, but then I dug into the niche topics (steganography, covert communication) that constitute my PhD research area and my expectations were tempered.

There’s a lot of noise in the research literature. Lots of papers get published that really don’t contribute much of anything to the field, but the existence of a bunch of papers often sends a signal that some concept is important and needs to be studied.

I find that often a big cluster of papers around a particular topic, none of which seems to move the needle much, is actually an indication that we need a new approach and writing more and more incremental papers just digs deeper into a local minimum.