What exactly do researchers do?

jsmoke said:
Not sure how accurate this site is but according to it a junior research fellow gets paid around £26000 a year at Oxford and about £10k a year more at most other universities, any idea why this is?

https://www.indeed.co.uk/salaries/junior-research-fellow-Salaries,-Oxford-ENG
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My guess would be that the prestige of the university is valuable to the person's career. Junior research fellow at Oxford university would probably carry more weight on a CV than junior research fellow at most other universities. I wouldn't be surprised if "beginning of your career" positions at other top tier universities also pays less than average.
 
adolf hamster said:
simple, the reason it wasnt used is because when researched it turned out to not be all that useful, something you couldn't have known without paying someone to do the leg work of finding out. [..]
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As well as that good reason, there's a couple of other good reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

1) Time. If time matters, it's better to fund several potential approaches simultaneously rather than consecutively. That way, if any of them turn out to be useful you'll get the useful one(s) faster. That's why there are dozens of SARS-CoV2 vaccines being researched simultaeously at the moment.
2) Time again, in a different sense. Research that has no practical uses now may well combine with future research and the combination may have practical uses. For example, early research into electricity usually had no practical uses.
 
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