Aveksana

Your most experienced supervisor is your biggest literature risk. Here is why that is not a criticism.
Senior supervisors are genuinely excellent at literature. They know which papers matter, how ideas evolved, who the influential figures are, what the open problems are. That knowledge is real and it took decades to build.
But it was built inside one citation network. 20 years of depth inside one network means 20 years of reinforcing what that network considers important. Their instinct for the important papers is calibrated to the field they built their career in. It is not wrong. It is local.
The adjacent literatures they do not know are not gaps in their knowledge. They are the natural result of the trade-off between depth and breadth. They chose depth. You are inheriting that choice without realizing it.
What to do: take their deep map seriously for positioning once you have a question. Before you have a question, read outside the edges of their map. Their depth is the resource. Their edges are yours to find.
Knowing this is your responsibility, not theirs.

You think you chose your research question. You did not.

Your supervisor suggested a domain. You read the top papers. The papers showed you what problems exist. You picked one. That felt like your idea. It was the field reproducing itself through you.

This is not a personal failure. It is the structure of academic entry. Every field has a dominant question set. It gets passed from supervisor to student to paper to the next student. Most researchers never notice it is happening because the socialization is gradual and it feels like learning.

Original contribution requires knowing this process is occurring before you are too deep inside it to question it.

The way out is not to ignore your supervisor or reject the literature. It is to read across fields before you read deep into one. Breadth before anchoring. Different communities frame the same constructs differently and that friction is where genuinely new questions live.

Is your question actually yours?

Your supervisor said it. Every research TikTok confirmed it. Start with the most-cited papers.
They're giving you phase-two advice while you're still in phase one.
There are two phases in research. Exploration is when you're still finding your angle, your focus, what question is even worth asking. Positioning is when you have a question and you're building the case around it.
The anchor-papers tactic works in positioning. In exploration, it backfires. Those papers don't just inform you — they socialize you into the field's existing question set. Your contribution drifts incremental. The exploration space collapses before it should.
And the terminology problem makes it worse. Different fields use different words for the same construct. Anchor on one citation network too early and you miss entire adjacent literatures that could have reframed your direction.
The real first step is knowing which phase you're in. Then matching the tactic to it.