Two hemispheres: Metascience vs Research Culture

Just back from Metascience2025 in London, its fourth global gathering and the first outside of the US (held online in 2021). 830 participants representing 65 countries, some better acclimatised to the scorching temperatures than others. As I’ve written elsewhere, the attendees were diverse in sector, discipline, role, and career stage. Rare for me to see cross-disciplinary academics, funders, publishers, research professionals, university administrators, government policymakers, journalists, and other stakeholders participating equally.

During my 4-year term as Dean for Research Culture, I’ve led, supervised, and commissioned many experiments and interventions designed to improve research cultures. I’ve often referred to this work as metascience and to my team as metascientists. Over time, these spheres have mentally merged to become lazily interchangeable. And over my two days at Metascience 2025, research culture and metascience have come apart and shifted in interesting ways.

By day two of the conference, I was struck by the lack of explicit mention of research culture or environment, in contrast to the ever-present mention of metascience, -scientists, -scientific, and all other derivational forms. Was this not a space for research culture conversations? Do we need to distinguish the two fields, categorising our work as this or that? What’s the difference anyhow?

Metascience: Systematic Science of Science

Metascience (or more inclusively, metaresearch) is the empirical study of how the scientific endeavour works: how it’s funded, assessed, conducted, analysed, and disseminated at scale. Its studies have focused on research funding, policy, reproducibility, peer review, incentives, and infrastructure. Its methods have largely been quantitative and algorithmic, though this is expanding rapidly to include qualitative, ethnographical, and behavioural approaches. The UK Metascience Unit’s first annual report, launched at the conference, focuses on projects such as interdisciplinary infrastructure, approaches to peer review, and AI-driven indicators of scientific novelty.

Many of the grassroots sessions at Metascience 2025 underscored the core agenda of the discipline: to diagnose inefficiencies in research systems and then test remedial approaches (e.g. open data, AI-powered analysis, funding by algorithm) to elevate scientific robustness.

Research Culture: Humans Powering the Science

Research culture concerns the norms and behaviours we bring to research systems. It includes drivers of behaviour such as career incentives; community, identity, and power structures; ethics, wellbeing, and recognition practices - all shaping our lives as researchers.

It wasn’t always easy to spot research culture sessions at the conference. Not many were explicitly labelled as such (search here), though they were certainly present and investigating central research culture issues such as researcher development and (un)professional behaviours. Some of these sessions lurked beneath metascientific keywords such as algorithm, model, rigour, replication, synthesis. Was this incentivised during the abstract submission process, bringing us quickly to metametaresearch?

Commonalities

Metascience is self-reflective. Research culture interventions are rigorous. Both are data-driven, encompassing the numerical and the narrative. Both are working for systemic reforms and policy shifts. Both should seek to decolonise and decentre locuses of power. If metascience’s ultimate goal is to enhance research efficiency and reliability, it both feeds and relies on culture’s aim of positive and inclusive environments, forming a virtuous circle.

Image problems

In my view, research culture has been incorrectly framed as something soft and nice-to-have, with all the gender implications that brings. It may also suffer in the UK as being driven by or even synonymous with the REF.

Metascience on the other hand is construed as objective, robust, and essential (ditto the damaging gender stereotypes). But it’s not all kudos: certain colleagues in research culture are turned off by metascience and the impression that experiments are extractive or in some way exploit the researchers it seeks to support.

Both Matter

In truth, the distinction is spurious. The division is unhelpful. Collaboration is essential. Through everything I learned at metascience, from the splashy main-stage policy plenaries through the grassroots experimental presentations, to one-on-one conversations and surprising corners of inspiration, it’s clear that improving research isn't just about tools. It's about people, values, and the conditions under which great research gets done.

Metascience without supportive culture risks driving reforms that feel abstract, detached, or impose undue burden. Technical fixes are insufficient without cultural transformation. Conversely, a positive culture without metascientific analytic tools will not get the buy-in needed for lasting revolution. Declarations and concordats will change nothing without human action within social structures. We need data, systems, and people working to the same goal, and can only achieve that through the complementary forces for good emerging from metascience and research culture endeavours.