A colleague of mine during graduate school who by consensus did everything right, and then just...no one in her cohort had the exposure she was interested in. To this day, no one is sure why.

The answer for a lot of this is to put in the hard work of building relationships with people who collect a lot of primary data, and make sure your work amplifies their work in a way that benefits you both. But that's a lot of effort, hard, and uncertain in its own ways.