Are any of you compulsive researchers?

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What an interesting thread. I had lived in the silicon valley area of California before the days of the internet and during and after the dot com boom. I now reside back in the UK. I fell in love with the internet.

I recently found out that internet research is a transferable skill. Please feel free to Google this term for more info. Research takes many skills. Skills which most As people have: Focus, creativity, systems thinking, eye for detail etc, etc. Having research skills can have many advantages.

I am most definitely a compulsive researcher and I absolutely love doing it. I spend more time looking stuff up than anything else I do in an average day. One example is reading about a city or town that I've never been to and would like to visit. I read travel guides, look up images of the place on Google Street View and make a note of attractions and places to eat, drink and shop. When I visited Oxford back in September, I had done extensive research of the place so knew where everything was and had a great day going around the city. I like to plan things in advance and this is an excellent way of doing it.

Herbivore? Carnivore? I'm an infovore.

Yes! I love researching all sorts of things! One reason why I like my job is that I have plenty of free time and Internet access to do this!

Special Interest + repetitive behavior + in many cases strong introversion = Compulsive researcher.

I have always considered it just a natural sense of curiosity, but I guess I do get pretty compulsive about it. I know I'm at it again when I look up at my tabs and see they won't all fit on the screen. lol. I can easily get "lost" in research, losing all track of time.

I definately do this a lot, especially if it's something I'm interested in. Ive been watching movies a lot more lately, and after every one, I would go and research everything I could find about them.

UFO's, Astronomy, Cars, Meteorology, you name it..

Can absolutely spend weeks at a time researching the same topic--IF I care about it. If I don't care, I won't get to the end of a sentence. But when I am curious about something, I can lose hours absorbing everything I can find on it. It paid off dividends in college--my bibliographies were exhaustive, with some really obscure sources that floored my professors. It also meant I wrote my 54-page senior thesis in two weeks flat, and won an award for best senior paper. And recently, I helped someone get top marks on HIS paper, because I was able to review what he had written and make suggestions on other resources he needed to include in order to refine his thesis and make it more cohesive.

Research is really the only thing that makes me feel really alive. I used to spend hours in the library after school, clicking through old newspapers on microfilm (I was about 11 and had no social life and couldn't play sports, what else was I to do?). I always felt very smug, filling out masses of interlibrary loan request slips for really obscure titles on very odd subjects, and taking them up to the loans counter (which I could barely see over). And I always, always read the footnotes and endnotes...the best stuff is in there

Research is, for me, like an adventure. You start at point A, then notice something which then leads you to point B, and in following up on a lead from B you are able to make connections C and D...and so on, until you end up with a web of investigations which lead to some awesome Eureka! moment. Much better than real life...so few adventures and revelations there...

I tend to get obsessed with certain topics and compulsively research them with the intention of publishing.

I have a folder full of rejection letters from journal editors who remind me that I what I consider to be deep and meaningful research is not what the NT world wants to read.

YES! I have stayed up until 4:00 a.m. surfing the net on some topic! Now I have an iPad and never put it down. If there is something I am interested in, I have to know everything about it. It is definitely a compulsion and when I was a kid, I read my encyclopedias every night in bed.

Yes.

Certainly...

Me too.
I think of myself as a knowledge hoarder. I really want to know everything about everything. I have thousands of books about so many things. I'll never be able to read them all, but I love going in there and just looking them. Sometimes a topic grabs my interest and I read it. I think owning the book makes me feel like I own the information, even if I hadn't read it yet. Books give a more in-depth, structured understanding, usually.

I also have way too many tabs open on my laptop. Much faster than books

If someone mentions anything I don't know about, I have to look it up.
If I see a familiar actor on a show, I find out who they are, look up their filmography, and identify where I recognize them from.
If it occurs to me that I can't define a word I just used or heard, I have to look it up. Sometimes I learn I was not quite right in my understanding of what it meant.
If I am singing and I am don't know a verse, I look it up and memorize it. (Pity so many versions on the net are wrong.)

One of my big problems at Uni was picking something to focus on. I wanted to do everything.

Thanks.

I am so glad that I joined wp. It's great to know that I am not the only person in love with research. I am learning so much from reading your posts.