Almost any scientist wants to work on solving an important problem, but at any given moment, it can be difficult to distinguish the topics that are ‘important’ from those that are ‘hot’. Often the scientific community does not immediately recognize the true significance of the work, and it can remain obscure for many years...
A scientist addressing a truly new problem, a first stager [7], should be prepared to pursue it alone for a time. Moreover, many journals will be reluctant to publish first-stage scientific work that will not immediately bring numerous citations, relegating the work to further obscurity and turning the whole process into a vicious cycle.
And:
The contemporary western approach to scientific funding is very prone to creating long-lasting positive feedbacks or vicious circles of false ‘hot topics’. Funding is distributed among scientific communities: the bigger the community, the greater the likelihood is that it will lobby for its share of funding. Therefore, when a scientist must choose which scientific direction to pursue, they are more likely to select a topic that comes with better funding. Thus, a large community that has assured its funding will become even larger. The increase in community membership within this subfield will lead to more publications and higher numbers of citations. At an extreme, a community could become ‘self-sufficient’, and attempts to challenge it by democratic means would be unlikely to succeed.
My perception is that hot topics in biology typically, while not necessarily the most intellectually important topics in the field, are topics that have been opened up by the development of some new technology that enables scientists to address an old question more comprehensively, or in more detail. Think of live imaging of cells with GFP, microarrays, better DNA sequencing technology, high-throughput protein and metabolite mass spectrometry, cancer genome projects, GWAS, metabolomics, etc. To a large degree, biology today is driven more by new technology, and less by new ideas about biology.
I'm not implying that technologically-driven questions are worthless, but they are frequently centered around issues that have already been widely recognized in the field, sometimes for decades.
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