Where next for metascience? Prospects, pitfalls & possibilities for the next 5 years. Talk by James Wilsdon at the AIMOS 2024 conference, Canberra, Australia. 19 November 2024
After a decade of steady growth, metascience is exploding into the mainstream. Its simple premise – that we should turn the methods and tools of research back towards analysing and improving the research system itself – is increasingly being embraced by governments, funding agencies and research communities themselves.
Of course, these agendas aren’t new: metascience builds on rich interdisciplinary currents of research into R&D systems. But there is also a growing cadre of researchers, policymakers and practitioners – in universities, R&D-intensive companies, funding agencies, private labs and foundations – who are now deploying advanced methods and data to investigate and improve research systems, cultures and decision-making.
Worldwide, we see new initiatives, investments and alliances being set up to strengthen the field. To give a few examples: the UK, where the government has established an in-house Metascience Unit and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has set up a metascience grants scheme; Canada, which recently launched a new cross-agency funding call for meta-research; Germany, where the Volkswagen Foundation has a programme for “Researching Research”; USA, where the NSF is complementing its existing “Science of Science” funding program by working with the Institute for Progress to experiment with its funding methods; China, where a recent Shanghai Declaration for the Science of Science called for more sustained and ambitious investment in these fields; Ireland, where there is a drive to embed metascience in the new combined funding agency, Research Ireland.
In this talk at the AIMOS 2024 conference in Canberra, James Wilsdon takes a whistle-stop tour through this changing landscape, and highlights some metascientific movers and shakers, hotspots and lacunae. He argues that metascience is less a discipline, and more an orientation or mode of engaging with questions that almost all researchers encounter at some point in the networks and institutions they inhabit. Finally, he offers a few thoughts on metascientific possibilities of the present moment, and outlines five priorities for the next five years.
