The concept “research culture” didn’t apparently exist until a few years ago. According to the Google ngram viewer, it only began around 1980.
Today, of course, it is enshrined in the Ref requirements for the UK: institutions are supposed to provide evidence of a research culture. A one-day event at Imperial College London (2 April 2025), funded by Research England, was labelled “a conference on research culture”, so I looked forward to learning more about it.
The day was summed up by Stephen Curry: “Talking about research culture is the best we can do”. In the absence of a formal definition, there was a lot of talk about what constitutes a research culture at one (admittedly exceptional) institution, Imperial College, but we also enjoyed a fascinating historical perspective from some older figures talking about the research culture they experienced at the start of their scholarly career, some forty or even fifty years ago. At that time, it appears, researchers were expected to work evenings and weekends on their project.
How to discover what a research culture is?
This conference asked the senior staff, researchers, and some other interested parties, such as major funders, to talk. I’m not sure if there was a consensus, or even clear answers (see below), but there were certainly some interesting insights. Some of the comments were rather circular, for example, Professor Peter Openshaw stated of his research days “I had such a happy time and it wouldn’t have been so happy had we not been so successful”. But this is the view of one of the victors.
Can research culture be measured ?
Yes, it seems, and the results are not encouraging. According to a survey of Russell Group (research-intensive) UK universities, researchers ranked their institution lowest for “research culture” and “community” compared with other criteria such as research supervision, resources, and so on. So, clearly, research culture isn’t what it could be, at least according to the researchers themselves.
What constitutes a good research culture?
It was surprisingly difficult at the end of the day to identify this. Some topics mentioned included:
Friends and colleagues
Clearly, friends are good. Stephen Webster mentioned famous working relationships from history, including Darwin and Huxley, and Crick and Watson. But he also pointed out that Dorothy Hodgkin was treated as an inferior by the men in the Crick and Watson team. A psychologist proposed that some degree of friendship was good, but there had to be limits to friendship.
The researchers were asked what constitutes a good or a bad day in science. Apart from the expected answers (getting the experiment right), I liked “seeing people succeed”, and “seeing others’ excitement”. But I also heard that “peer review is an emotional grinder”, and causes “trauma”. One or two of the researchers stated in the coffee break they didn’t have time for such initiatives as open peer review – they had to get their papers placed in the influential journals. There didn’t seem to be much of a concept of friendly reviews.
Shared space
A very practical idea, to have a shared space for people to chat and interact, was liked by the participants, although the specific space for Imperial staff was criticized as “tribal” at times – each discipline tended to stay with their peers. More than one person spoke fondly about a local pub (no longer there) as a way to meet people from nearby institutions.
Other complaints
Not particularly related to research culture, but very vociferously stated, were complaints that “Google is sabotaging our researchers”, and “how are we going to protect our copyright from LLMs?”. This seemed a rather negative view of what AI tools can do for research.
Making the event more inclusive
- This was an event by, and largely for, Imperial. It looked to me as if 90% of the attendees were involved with Imperial in some way. But the topic is much broader, and relevant to any institution where research takes place.
- The event focused on lab research and medical training. I wouldn’t describe medical training as a research culture, and even lab work is not necessarily typical of scholarly work as a whole. Much research, perhaps the bulk of research, takes place elsewhere, either at a desk, in a library, or talking to people. Using the ever-reliable Copilot, it suggested that even for experimental science, researchers only spend 50%–70% of their time in the lab, with the rest at their desk. Defining a research culture as getting a result from your experiment will only cover a small proportion of the possible use cases.
- There were surprisingly few references to Open Science – in fact, the only direct reference to it was a critical one (“If we open up science not everyone can deal with it, because not everyone has the resources of Imperial.”). The proponents of Open Science would, I am sure, argue that Open Science practices, such as open peer review, create a better research culture. The practice of documenting negative results was mentioned, and the editor of Nature, Magdalena Skipper, stated confidently that “At Nature we publish negative results, as long as they are impactful” (although it’s difficult to imagine how impactful many negative findings might be, however valuable they are for science).
Conclusion
Even if this wasn’t an event to deliver takeaways on how to promote research culture, this was a fascinating day, exceptional for me to be able to hear some of the most influential figures in research science talking about their career, their science practice, and their institution.
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