Area of investment and support

UK Metascience Unit

Established in 2024, the UK Metascience Unit is a small team of policymakers, analysts and funding delivery specialists who work across UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). The unit is co-led by Dr Jen Gold and Dr Ben Steyn.

All our work starts from a simple idea: that the scientific method, so powerful in so many areas of life, should be systematically and routinely applied to how we practice, fund and support science itself.

• Budget: An initial budget of £10 million from 2024 to 2027
• Duration: Ongoing
• Partners involved: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)

Show related funding opportunities

The scope and what we're doing

The unit has three main functions:

1. Administering multi-million-pound competitive grants programmes to grow the UK’s metascience academic community and encourage applied research that is useful to policy and research and development delivery. This includes the unit forging international collaborations with other funders.
2. Designing and delivering a portfolio of internal experiments, including large sample size randomised controlled trials, historic data analysis projects, shadow experiments and policy pilots, to understand ‘what works’ in the funding processes undertaken by UKRI.
3. Disseminating metascience insights to ensure DSIT, UKRI and other UK research and development funders have access to the best available evidence. A presence in central DSIT ensures the unit’s portfolio remains relevant to the departmental priorities and to help shape the UK government’s research and development strategy.

Metascience typically examines the institutional structures, practices and incentives explaining how researchers spend their time and the speed, direction, nature and impact of their outputs.

Some key metascience topics of particular interest to the unit include:

• funding allocation, where it has been often noted that traditional processes can be overly risk-averse, biased, inequitable and inefficient
• devising better metrics for understanding the quality of research efforts
• addressing the replication ‘crisis’, where several highly-cited historical studies appear to be based on irreplicable evidence
• understanding and evaluating how artificial intelligence is changing the work of scientists
• a range of other topics, including industry-academic collaboration, interdisciplinarity, the publication system, emerging sub-field detection, research integrity and replicability, and most recently the interaction of artificial intelligence and science

Why we're doing it

Each year, billions of pounds of public funding is invested in the research and innovation system. The figure is much higher once funding from non-profits and the private sector is included.

Until recently, relatively little funding and attention has been paid towards optimising how this money is spent, even when we know a thriving research and development system is vital to:

• driving policy change
• supporting better career opportunities
• boosting economic growth
• enabling novel fundamental research that prepares us for future challenges

Science is a complex social endeavour and so the question of how to improve it is necessarily complex too. It deserves to be the object of deep and rigorous study. This is why we need a unit dedicated to metascience, the science of science.

Investing in research, development and innovation is vital to UK and international economic growth and prosperity. However, it is not just the quantity of that investment that matters, but also the quality. How research is funded and practiced is critical to accelerating scientific breakthroughs and innovations, nurturing talent, and shaping research culture.

‘Metascience’ is a growing movement among academics, governments, private and philanthropic funders and research-performing institutions. They are all increasingly concerned with how to get the most out of the money society spends on research and development.

Within the metascience community there are two characteristic groups:

1. Researchers using rigorous social scientific methods (for example, experiments and qualitative, or quantitative, data analysis) to study the practice of science itself. This includes expertise from a range of disciplinary backgrounds from the full breadth of the research and development system, including economics, sociology, cognitive science, data science, innovation studies, business and management sciences, science of science, scientometrics and information sciences, history of science, science and technology studies, anthropology, as well as major contributors from researchers in other areas (for example, engineering and mathematics).
2. A community of practice united by an interest in designing, implementing, and evaluating innovative modes of science funding and delivery. This includes scientific researchers, and staff within research funders, research performing institutions, consultancies and private enterprises.

The UK Metascience Unit’s thesis is that these two groups acting together and in collaboration can improve our scientific ecosystem by understanding what works in research funding, policy and practice.

Through collaboration, academic enquiry can generate and evaluate hypotheses to be put in practice by research funders and science practitioners. In turn, this can fuel new lines of academic enquiry. This feedback loop leads ultimately to a scientific ecosystem that improves itself over time.

Opportunities, support and resources available

Funding opportunities

• Pre-announcement: UKRI Metascience AI early career fellowships

  Maximum award: £260,000

  Closing date: 10 April 2025

See the Data sandpit for metascience funding opportunity.

Past projects, outcomes and impact

See the 2024 UKRI Metascience research grants funding opportunity.

Who to contact

Ask a question about this area of investment

Email: metascience@ukri.org

Last updated: 13 January 2025