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’, or ‘the science of science’, 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.
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.
Key metascience topics 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 and impact of research efforts
- addressing the replication ‘crisis’, where several highly-cited historical studies appear to be based on irreplicable evidence
- 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
Within the metascience community there are two characteristic groups:
- Researchers using rigorous social scientific methods (for example, experiments and qualitative, or quantitative, data analysis) to study the social practice of science itself. This diverse group features contributors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including:
- economics
- sociology
- cognitive science
- innovation studies
- business and management sciences
- science of science
- scientometrics and information sciences
- history of science
- anthropology
This group also includes major contributors who would nominally consider themselves researchers in other areas (for example, physical sciences, medicine, engineering and mathematics), but have stepped out from their usual area of study to consider the system they work within.
- 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.
