Here are some swiftly assembled thoughts on #Metascience2025. Congratulations to the organisers. It was an excellent, full and balanced conference, bringing together many disparate strands. They threaded a complex needle really well.

The most stimulating sessions for me were ‘A Mosaic of metascience’, ‘AI for research statistics and evaluation’ and ‘Are metascientists reinventing the wheel?’. I took away lots of questions and many insights to ponder.

The plenary by Cassidy Sugimoto and the accompanying contributions were excellent. The talks from Sabine Leonelli, Marin Dacos and Ludo Waltman were very enjoyable and memorable for different reasons.

The standard of contributions was very high, athough the multi-speaker plenaries and question format didn’t work that well overall, though. It diluted the impact of and dialogue with different contributors.

The concept of a ‘discourse coalition’ introduced early by James Wilsdon was resonant and captured what was going on the different threads. It stuck with me through different sessions.

One speaker referred to Metascience as ‘successful branding’ to engage policy makers; another spoke of it ‘strategically forgetting’ well-established disciplines like STS and Philosophy of Science.

Another speaker acknowledged the value of the ‘discourse coalition’ lens but contrasted it with a ‘practice coalition’, which metascience is emphatically not. (apologies, I can't credit anyone for these insights)

I’m still unsure on how coherent a grouping ‘Metascience’ represents, and whether the tensions between different strands will prove too great for it to retain efficacy long term. These were all very helpful conceptual insights for thinking about it.

China’s scientific progress was discussed but was under-discussed. Europe’s relative lack of scientific progress was discussed but was under-discussed.

Per some interactions yesterday on Twitter, one might refer to the strand they represent as the ‘experimental’, ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘tech-aligned’ strand.

I am also struck by the idea that there are ‘Twitter’ and ‘Bluesky’ strands of ‘metascience’. This bears more thought, but I note that conference organisers, and the UK Metascience Unit, are doing a good job navigating and bringing these two strands together.

‘A Vision for Metascience’ by Neilsen and Qiu is referenced at twice in ‘A Year in Metascience’ (which I haven’t had a chance to read properly yet) but it’s not clear that it is much known by or much of an influence on those in attendance. I would like to see this change.

(I additionally note that Tyler Cowen was in London on Tuesday but not to speak at the #Metascience2025. That was a missed opportunity).

Librarians were generally conspicuous by their absence. This is really unusual for conferences I normally attend; it warrants remark and more thought.

Publishers were conspicuous by their absence, with and as notable exceptions (apologies if I missed other folks). This is perhaps not surprising, given the expressed desire to disrupt publishing, and frustration with historic disruption attempts.

There was also the strongly expressed desire to to move away from Bibliometrics as the main analytic tool of metascience. I wonder how much metascience interests or needs publishers?

Finally, I don't not know if ‘metascience’, ‘meta-research’, ‘research on research’ and ‘science of science’ are truly synonyms or represent different things?