Some regions of a field feel crowded before you have read a single text in them, simply because the density of prior work exerts a pull that shapes where new work chooses to locate itself. A well-established subfield attracts disproportionate new contribution not necessarily because it is more important than an underpopulated one, but because density itself functions like gravity: more existing work means more citation opportunities, more legible entry points, more chance of recognition for anyone who joins it. WordMagnet reappears here at the scale of an entire field rather than a single search term: dense regions magnetise new attention regardless of their remaining intellectual yield, while sparse regions go unexplored regardless of their potential, purely because gravity favours mass that already exists. Recognising field gravity as a structural force, rather than as evidence of where the real questions live, is a precondition for anyone trying to work productively in a field's genuinely underpopulated regions.
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