The Future of Research
The Future of Research
Scientists are facing unprecedented challenges, but there is also a lot to look forward to. Researchers believe that new levels of collaboration and openness, as well as increased sources of funding and technologies will help them create a bright future for scientific research.
A key element of this is ensuring that the current trainee pool of graduate students and postdocs continues to produce an abundance of highly skilled researchers. This is essential to the continued success of science in the US.
Collaboration as a Force for Impact
Collaboration is a key component of research. It enables researchers to pool their knowledge and expertise and work on projects that address real-world problems.
In recent years, there has been an increasing push towards research collaboration across countries, between countries and within regions. This is driven by a belief that interdisciplinary, multinational teams can improve scientific output.
The benefits of collaboration include increased productivity, lower risk and higher quality. However, this is not always the case and collaboration can be a source of tension between different groups.
For example, many academics believe that research collaboration can reduce their autonomy. This is despite the fact that autonomy remains an important value in modern universities, regarded as necessary for research to be productive and successful.
Transparency and Openness in Science
In science, transparency and openness are essential to the confirmation of hypotheses, theories, data, and results. It is also necessary for the promotion of trust among scientists by fostering cooperation and collaboration.
Researchers can contribute to the move toward research transparency by promoting open practices in their institutions and departments. For example, they can include prepared statements of commitment to open practices in their grant applications even when these are not specifically required.
They can influence institutional recruitment and promotion processes to reward and encourage research transparency at the institution level. For instance, departmental job descriptions and panels can ask candidates to demonstrate that they have a track record of preregistrations, replications, open data and code, power analyses, theoretical motivations, and rigorous experimental design.
Similarly, journals can promote transparency and openness through their policies, procedures, and practices (see Fig. 1). The Center for Open Science (COS) created the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP Guidelines), which have eight modular standards that journal policies, procedures, and practices can follow at three levels of compliance: disclosure, requirement, and verification.
Investing in Diverse Research Teams
Research shows that diversity on teams promotes more creativity and innovation, improves governance and problem-solving abilities, and helps to develop stronger companies. In fact, Boston Consulting Group found that companies with more diverse management teams enjoyed 19% higher revenues than their less diverse counterparts during 2018 to 2020.
Similarly, a recent study found that women in executive teams are more collaborative than men and they often do more research on potential risks before making a decision. This is because women are better at identifying and evaluating risks before a decision is made, which can help reduce risk in a team environment.
In addition, a recent analysis of GDP trends by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that gender and racial diversity have been increasing in occupations that require specialized knowledge over the past 50 years, even though there remains a large gap between the number of people who are women and those who are people of color. These findings are significant because they suggest that a high-functioning scientific team can break existing hierarchies and gendered patterns of interaction in order to create more effective research environments.
Building a Sustainable Research Ecosystem
The future of research is shaped by technology and digital innovation. Science and tech innovations can drive faster, more effective, and sharper solutions to some of society’s most pressing issues.
Building a sustainable research ecosystem is critical to the future of research in Canada and around the world. A healthy research ecosystem depends on ample opportunities for new researchers to break into the system and establish themselves, avoiding gaps as they transition to mid-career, and providing strong support for researchers in their peak years of output and impact.
One of the most promising areas of research is place-based social-ecological sustainability research (PBSESR). PBSESR has emerged as a key driver for a more integrated, transdisciplinary approach to the management of natural resources and the resulting benefits to human wellbeing.