Is there any way to do good research without people noticing or follow up on my work? My research, which in my opinion, is quite important, has unfortunately been getting noticed by people who has previously ignored them and systematically avoided to cite them.
This is not ideal for me! Because I want to remain as virtually anonymous for as long as possible so I don't get scooped. I really hate the feeling that the moment I publish my next paper there will be a flurry of paper that follow my work, leaving me with nothing to work on!
Is there anyway I can still remain anonymous and secretly working on my breakthroughs?
Help!
The prospect of getting &quot;scooped&quot; in extensions to your research project is rarely a big problem, because you always maintain a head-start on others through the period of time it takes for a paper to go from completion and submission to a journal to publication.  Even if your paper is extremely well-written in the first instance, there is usually at least a six month delay between initial submission and publication; if you require revisions to the paper then the period of delay is longer, and it can often take years until publication occurs.
Now, obviously you can start working on extensions to your work at any time you want.  If you do your work sequentially, and you start working on extensions as soon as you submit your previous work, you will still have a head-start of at least six months (if not a year or two) on those who later read your published work and then decide to extend it in like manner.  If that head-start is insufficient then you can always start working on your extensions before submitting the finished product of previous work.
Irrespective of this, I would encourage you to see interest from other researchers as a desirable outcome, and be flattered if there is a &quot;flurry of papers&quot; that follow your work.  (Oh, what I wouldn't give to have such a problem!)  This is desirable for the progression of science and other academic fields.  It is useful to have multiple researchers pursuing research in a field to progress it more broadly and rapidly, to give a heterogenous range of approaches on the subject, and to act as a check on erroneous work.  Most researchers have the opposite problem --- it is often difficult to get other people interested in your work, and many good papers end up with zero citations because they do not attract interest from others.