The German sociologist Max Weber famously described science as more than a job, as a calling or vocation. There is no doubt that research careers today remain more than just a sequence of jobs, science is a profession that largely relies on collaboration and teamwork that takes place in disciplinary communities with their own set of highly skilled practices, theories, and tools. These scientific communities are important in setting the cultural norms and values that researchers are expected to adopt and advance in their work.
The public funding of science also implies that these research communities and the scientists who work within them have certain responsibilities toward society. Sometimes scientists are criticised for being too remote from society – working away in their ‘ivory towers’. But other scientists have been influential on the social stage, the ‘public intellectuals’ that contribute their expertise to public debates and decision-making processes.
One way to think about the relationship between scientific research careers is to think about not just how a scientist’s work contributes to building knowledge in their field, but also to how it contributes to embedding and advancing the kinds of societal expectations that Barry Bozeman and Daniel Sarewitz called ‘public values’. Public values can be understood from the kinds of attributes that a society likes to hold up as inspirational or foundational. Values such as freedom, equality, and honesty, for example.
The idea of a research career ‘in and for society’ is that there are different ways of doing research and becoming involved in scientific cultures that can shape a researcher’s career in terms of how, and how much, it contributes not just to science but also to society. This can include many different aspects, from conducting ethical and honest research, to engaging with citizens to share results or collaborating with governments or companies to try and deliver outcomes that can address public needs.
If we think of the example of the SARS-COV-2 virus and the Covid-19 pandemic, the immediate response of many researchers and scientific communities to this global challenge was not focused just on making scientific breakthroughs, but how to deliver on a societal expectation that public researchers demonstrate their ‘responsiveness’ to the needs of their fellow citizens.
While this may be seen as an ‘exceptional’ case, there are many everyday practices and typical activities through which researchers can contribute to furthering public values and creating both scientific and societal impacts through their professional life.
How are public values integrated in scientific work and culture?
One way to monitor research careers in and for society then is to look at what scientists do that both reflects and consolidates public values. Many scientists have a great deal of freedom in deciding what they conduct research on, how they design their investigations, and who they work with. They also often have choices they can make about which societal groups they might try to benefit through the results of their work.
Table 1 contains some examples of the kinds of choices about professional practices about which scientists have relative autonomy. These choices refer to different types of ‘attributes’ that can be associated with their research career trajectory. Table 1 also makes connections between the adoption of these practices and the performance of certain ‘public values’.
Research career attributes and public values
Attribute: invent, adopt, or train | Research practice | Public value mechanism | Public values |
Open Science (OS) practices | FAIR data, open-source tools, shared in scientific community and beyond Rapid data sharing & dissemination Documentation of methods | Efficient knowledge production, enhanced inclusion of stakeholders Accelerated responsiveness to societal challenges Reproducibility of results | Efficiency Transparency |
Research Integrity and ethics (REI) practices | External ethics approval acquired Research data management plan Pre-registration of research approach | Assessment of potential harm Process for protection of personal information Reduction in questionable research practices (QRPs) | Integrity Privacy Fairness |
Public Engage-ment (PE) practices | Designing and implementing approaches for societally relevant research results Designing and implementing processes to achieve societally relevant research outcomes | Co-creation of research agendas Co-production of knowledge and impact pathways | Legitimacy Efficacy Responsiveness |
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) practices | Non-discriminatory and unbiased training, hiring and promotion processes | Diversity and gender balance in the workplace | Equality Fairness |
Gender content analysis | Consideration and integration of gender issues in the design of research | Research outcomes that address both women and men | Equality Fairness Legitimacy |
The research career attributes and associated practices shown in Table 1 are far from a comprehensive list and only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the many areas of their work in which scientists make choices about openness and responsibility in their work. Neither are these attributes identical in how they should be thought about in terms of the diversity of roles in scientific disciplines and how these vary at time career stages.
The unfolding of scientific careers
Scientific careers take place simultaneously in organizations, which provide a workplace and a salary, and peer communities, which provide collaborators, key questions, and judgements about the quality of any members’ work. These disciplinary communities are diverse, due to the different epistemic methods, theories, and questions they address. The norms of a ‘typical’ career ‘script’ vary to some extent between communities. This means that the types, or expressions, research career attribute that contribute to public values will likely differ by disciplines as well. For example, while open science is a very prominent and important dimension of providing shared datasets to support genomic biosciences, it is not so in qualitative health sciences where data privacy is the paramount concern.
Along with scientific discipline, the configuration of research career attributes that contribute to public values will vary by the career stage of the researcher. Senior researchers typically have control over resources and research priorities and can more directly shape both what research is done and how it is done. Research career attributes of early career researchers will therefore also reflect the preferences and decisions of their mentors and group leaders.
Expectations about the configuration of research career attributes that contribute to public values thus needs to be tempered by understandings of career stage. For example, a senior scientist who has made a successful career in a field in which open science has only recently emerged cannot necessarily be expected to adopt open science practices in their work. However, this same senior scientist may understand the value of open science and fund and support the open science training of early careers researchers in their lab.
Monitoring research career attributes as a proxy for contributions to public values
Support for open and responsible research practices and cultures is first and foremost something that relies on decisions of individual researchers and of research groups. Monitoring the kinds of research career attributes that different research communities acquire, by entrenching certain practices and norms within their discipline, is a complex task that requires multiple perspectives and approaches – without any illusion that such a monitoring effort could be (or should be) comprehensive.
At PROMISE monitoring of research career attributes that can contribute to public values uses researcher survey data. Data on the adoption and perception of open and responsible research practices are available for several key dimensions including:
- Gender Equality
- Open Science
- Public Engagement
- Research Integrity and Ethics
These data can be compared by scientific discipline and by researcher career stage.
Taking the example of researchers’ public engagement practice we can look at the rate at which researchers at different career stages report collaborating with different types of societal stakeholders.
Researchers’ cooperation with societal stakeholder, by career stage
R1 | R2 | R3 | R4 | TOTAL | |
Citizens | 45,8% | 54,1% | 58,7% | 64,5% | 57,3% |
Govt. | 52,6% | 63,1% | 69,6% | 79,5% | 68,5% |
Firms | 36,6% | 45,1% | 52,2% | 59,9% | 50,4% |
NGOs | 54,2% | 57,1% | 64,1% | 69,9% | 62,7% |
CSOs | 34,6% | 37,4% | 37,4% | 43,8% | 38,8% |
Average | 44,8% | 51,4% | 56,4% | 63,5% |
A majority of respondents reported cooperating on projects with government (68.5%), NGOs (62.7%), citizens (57.3%) and firms (50.4%). For all types of stakeholders, a similar pattern can be observed by career stage, with cooperation rates rising as the research career advances. This suggests that establishing such cooperation relations should not be something that is expected of early career researchers but is more likely to occur as experience and control over research and resources grows.
Looking specifically at researchers’ engagement with citizens, we can look at the extent to which working with citizens is typically part of research projects. Engaging with citizens is most likely to have taken place in a few of the projects that researchers participated in. We can also see that in the early stages of the career it is less likely that citizen engagement is part of project work. Overall, the likelihood of engagement with citizens grows over the course of the career. This needs to be taken into account when considering appropriate ways to recognise and reward researchers’ engagement activities.
Researcher engagement with citizens in research projects, by career stage
R1 | R2 | R3 | R4 | All | |
Yes, in all projects I have been a part of | 9,00% | 7,20% | 5,80% | 8,20% | 7,30% |
Yes, in most of the projects | 13,50% | 14,20% | 15,60% | 16,80% | 15,30% |
Yes, in few of them | 23,30% | 32,80% | 37,30% | 39,40% | 34,70% |
No, in none of them | 54,20% | 45,90% | 41,30% | 35,50% | 42,70% |
100,00% | 100,00% | 100,00% | 100,00% | 100,00% |
Researchers participation in activities that institutionalize open and responsible research are career attributes that contribute to the performance of public values. It is apparent that the acquisition of such career attributes will vary between disciplines and by career stage. Monitoring research careers in and for society can play an important role in mapping out the contours of such activities along these dimensions. This can have an important learning function, particularly in relation to policy driven reforms of researcher assessment, by revealing the contours of researchers’ practices with greater context and preventing the assumption of a one-size-fits-all understanding of which open and responsible practices are desirable or feasible in these varied career contexts.
A range of different practices and researcher motivations can be examined at PROMISE using career stage, disciplinary and other filters here.