It does help that when you are one of the first to latch on to a trending research area, there is relatively little in the way of competition for attention, funding and publishing priority. Also, in such scenarios domain specific standards and expectations have yet to be set and thus are not something that your research will be held to, at least not until the field begins to mature. In fact your research may form the basis for some of those conventions. This does not necessarily mean that the research was particularly noteworthy, thorough, or inherently outstanding.