I recommend this book. It is not about cold fusion per se, but you can learn a lot about cold fusion from it:
Cardwell, Donald. Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology (Norton History of Science) (p. 498). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Here is an interesting quote from the book, p. 498 Kindle edition. This shows how important cold fusion researchers are. I think it also shows that while academic papers are important, hands-on cooperation in the lab is essential.
. . . The industry will have a corresponding professional institution and journal. In outline the same principle can be traced back to the medieval guilds. Such a system does not inhibit, in fact it may well encourage, evolutionary improvement but it may – and for familiar reasons – resist radical innovation for which there will be few or no precedents and which, as we saw, tends to be brought about by individuals from outside the industry or technology. The objection, then, is that a strictly evolutionary history of technology would obscure this, surely important, feature of the processes of invention and innovation. Furthermore, with a revolutionary invention a new language and a new vocabulary have often to be created, and ‘new men’ appear – much to the bewilderment and often the disapproval of the older generation. How many stagecoach drivers, for example, could have understood the terms used by locomotive engineers in 1831? Older people are baffled by the language of computing; their children take to it easily.
A second objection is ad hominem. The historian in his or her study can easily describe the early history of the steam engine as an evolutionary process, beginning with imaginative speculators such as Branca, de Caus, the Earl of Worcester and going on to include von Guericke, Hautefeuille, Huygens, Papin and then Savery, before Newcomen rounds off the story with his successful engine of 1712. However, our experiences in building and operating an exact replica of the 1712 engine (at one third scale it stands five metres high) has convinced us of the original genius of Newcomen, a real hero-engineer. Problems, not mentioned in any of the literature, were met and overcome; the true functions of the key components were fully understood and their relationship to the operation of the engine appreciated. . . . Much has already been learned that is not to be found in the written records. It follows that any levelling down of technological achievement, and with it of the hero-engineer, must tend to obscure key features of the process and make difficult any objective evaluation of individual cases. A final lesson is that there is great scope for practical experimentation to supplement (and correct) history based solely on documentary evidence. In addition to these specific objections, there is the general point that, the course of political history being determined, at least in part, by statesmen, kings, conquerors and prelates, the reader will expect to find analogous figures in the course of the history of technology. That expectation should be met. A history without notable figures, without major episodes and in which all is ascribed to social action, would be an unsatisfactory and, in the last resort, a sterile affair.