Metascience for whom? A question as old as science.
Before we fix science, we need to ask who built it!
Since I came to the UK to do my undergraduate degree in Pharmacology, I have carried questions with me. Questions about how academic institutionalised science actually works. About its funding, its incentives, its journals, and the way knowledge gets disseminated. About scientific methods themselves. About who is excluded from the system. About when students became customers in their relationship with the university. About why we disseminate science in a language the public can’t understand, in journals no one can access. About what gets funded, and why some questions attract money while others starve.
The system, as I watched it operate, never looked intuitive to me.
While completing my PhD in Computational Biology, working across wet labs, machine learning predictions and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, I found that decoupling the question of “what I study” from the institutionalised system that contains it felt counterintuitive. They were never separate in my mind. The science and the container for it arrived together.
When I started questioning the container, the institution, the funding streams, the incentive structures, the replication crisis seemed a natural outcome of how the system is designed (Figure 1). These questions are not optional extras for researchers. They are a natural part of what it means to be an academic, a researcher, an intellectual. Each one of us engages with them in their own way. In my case, it was through advocacy in open science, through creating spaces where we open these conversations and try to make room for them.
As I have engaged more with the community around these questions, I have noticed something else. The same questions get approached very differently depending on who is asking. Researchers approach them one way. Policy makers another. Practitioners, another still. Each one has a different kind of skin in the game. And the questions themselves get branded in certain ways, packaged for certain audiences. The words we use to name them are not neutral either. Some call this work “open science.” Others place it in “Science and Technology Studies” or the “philosophy of science.” The latest branding is “Metascience”.
These schools of thought, these communities, they overlap. But they also speak different languages and norms. “Philosophy of science” asks: what makes a claim true? “Science and Technology Studies” asks: who made this claim count as true? It asks about power. “Metascience” asks: how do we make the system that produces claims work better with empirical evidence? Each question is valid. Each reveals something the others might miss. But the framing also redirects attention. It shapes what we notice, what we measure, what we fight about. We are all, in some sense, talking about the same system. But we are not all talking about it in the same way, and that difference matters.
The question of how to make the system that produces claims work better cannot be asked without also untangling what makes a claim true, whose knowledge is valid, whether there is a plurality of ways of thinking. Without understanding the latter, the former cannot be established, because the root and foundational layers must be questioned first. This is what some people call systems thinking. Academia, in that sense, is a complex system, not a complicated one. There is an important difference.
A complicated system can be broken down into deterministic parts, and once you understand each component, you can more or less predict and control the whole. A complex system works differently. It shows non-linear behaviour, where every intervention changes the surrounding context and creates new, often unexpected effects. Our academic system is a complex system. So we need to understand it in a broader context, as a system, rather than trying to fix isolated pieces. In a broader context, especially economics and politics. We cannot decouple the problems we have in academia from the economic and geopolitical situation we are living in. We need to realise how the feedback loops work and how they are connected. But most of the time, we avoid these kinds of conversations.
Who gets to say what counts as a proper question in a new field?
Disciplines do not emerge because a new topic appears in the world. They emerge because of power dynamics, because someone, or some group, powerful enough, successfully claims that a new way of seeing should have its own home, its own journals, its own departments, its own funding streams, its own rites of passage for new generations. This is not a clean process. It is messy, political, and deeply human.
In 2023, a new unit was established within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). It is called the UK Metascience Unit. Their definition of metascience is as follows:
“Metascience is a growing movement among academics, governments, private and philanthropic funders and research-performing institutions. They are all increasingly concerned with how to get the most out of the money society spends on research and development. Within the metascience community there are two characteristic groups: (1) Researchers using rigorous social scientific methods to study the practice of science itself; (2) A community of practice united by an interest in designing, implementing, and evaluating innovative modes of science funding and delivery. The UK Metascience Unit’s thesis is that these two groups acting together and in collaboration can improve our scientific ecosystem by understanding what works in research funding, policy and practice.” (UK Metascience Unit, 2025)
In a Metascience fellowship call announced last year, as I read it, I saw things I had been wanting to spend time reading and researching. So I wrote my first fellowship proposal and submitted it. Then I forgot about it entirely, until I received an email saying my proposal would be awarded. You can read more about the fellowship here.
In my conversations with my fellow cohort members funded in the UK, Canada, and the US, the same questions kept coming up. What is metascience? Who gets to call themselves a “metascientist”? These questions surfaced so many times that I decided to chop down some thoughts. They might not be the traditional ones in this space.
Are the questions of metascience novel? And do we really need yet another discipline?
There is a quiet assumption buried in the way we talk about “metascience” these days that studying the system of science is a new, sometimes a specialised field. A niche for the dedicated few. But here is the thing: scientists have always approached their questions with one hand on their scientific work and the other poking at the system around them — and they should be encouraged to do so. This includes STEM scientists like Albert Einstein, who in 1949 wrote an essay called “Why Socialism?” arguing about the system, about the relationship between the individual and society, about how private control of information distorts public understanding. Questioning the system while still researching in our discipline was never separate. It was just… thinking.
This was true even before “institutionalised” science took shape in the 19th century. The historian Timothy Lenoir has shown how scientific disciplines were actively constructed in German universities during this period, shaped by cultural, political and even aesthetic practices. The container in which we function is designed by humans, and it is not inevitable.
The questions we now ask under the banner of “metascience” are very old. They never stopped being asked. But the system itself, largely formalised in the 19th century by figures like Humboldt, has remained largely unchanged, and over time it has accumulated problems that are now hard not to notice. Problems that harm even those that the system was initially designed to accommodate. The questions have just been renamed. And they should always remain part of what it means to be a researcher, an academic, an intellectual.
At the Metascience conference in London in June 2024, the same question came up again and again. One of the panellists said something that, for me, landed as the most convincing answer yet: “Metascience ticks boxes for policy people. It sounds empirical. It sounds like better science, and less wasted resources.” And there is an implicit assumption beneath that. It carries that aura of objectivity, treats science as an “investment of capital” that should be optimised to create more innovations that are profitable to capital. This is the language of productivity, efficiency, economic growth and returns.
The metascience movement should be careful when it tackles funding. When it talks about funding models, it should also ask the harder questions. Who benefits from the current system? Why do we study funding models without questioning who holds the money in the first place? How is all of this connected to our economy, to our modes of production? Is there any alternative to the current liberal order of society? These are not abstract philosophical asides. They are the questions that determine what kind of knowledge gets made, and what kind never gets a chance.
And the stakes are high. How do we conceptualise equity, liberty, what counts as progress, what kind of economic growth, and whose knowledge counts as legitimate knowledge? These are not abstract. They are woven into the system. Into funding, journals, rankings, intellectual life, and scientific methods themselves. We see these questions asked across different traditions, traditions we would do well to learn from. Not by creating a new isolated community with its own norms and vocabulary, but by understanding how others have asked the same questions, in different eras, from different wells and using different approaches.
On Chinese Traditions: the science of science
Meanwhile, in China, there are conversations about a “science of science” that do not map neatly onto Western categories. The philosopher Feng Qi (1915–1995) developed what he called “wisdom theory,” zhihui shuo, which tries to weave together ontology, epistemology, logic, and value theory into one cloth, not separate threads. His “broad theory of knowledge” insists that questions about what exists, how we know, how we reason, and what we value cannot be pulled apart. They belong together. The question is not just “how do we know?” but “how does knowing connect to living?” Feng Qi spoke of “transforming knowledge into wisdom” (zhuan shi cheng zhi), a process where empirical knowledge is not an end in itself but a path toward deeper understanding. It asks what science is for, not just how to make it more efficient.
On the Hawza tradition: The science of principles
In the Hawza, the old seminaries of Iraq and Persia, where scholars still sit on the floor with texts worn soft from handling, they have been doing this work for centuries. Not under the name “Metascience” or “Philosophy of science”. Under other names. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr wrote Al-Usus al-Mantiqiyyah lil-Istiqra, The Logical Foundations of Induction. This book is a deep inquiry into how we derive knowledge from sources, what counts as evidence, how we reason from observation to conclusion. Al-Sadr attempts to lay out a unifying basis for research across different domains, showing that the logic of induction applies whether we are studying the natural world, human society, or ancient texts. These are not separate domains with separate rules. They are part of one inquiry.
This is the same question Francis Bacon and Karl Popper asked, but asked from a different well, with a different cup. Al-Muzaffar, another towering figure, wrote ‘Ilm al-mantiq, the science of logic, and within logic there is ‘ilm al-istiqra’, the science of induction. The tools of inquiry. In the Islamic tradition, these questions are not separate from the questions of how to live, what is just, how to acquire knowledge, and what is good. They are all part of one fabric and require systems thinking.
There is something else we should notice here. We’re often convinced that to sustain universities, we have to rely on oligarchs and private donors, but the Hawza tells a different story. For over a thousand years, the Hawza tradition has sustained itself without relying on oligarchs, without courting billionaires, without shaping its research agenda to please private donors. Instead, it built a different kind of economy. This meant the institution could outlive its founders, could continue funding scholarship for centuries, without ever having to chase the next grant or flatter the next donor. This is not to say at all that this is the best model, but to show that alternatives exist for how communities organise their teaching and research institutions, and this is one piece of evidence.
The Uniqueness of this moment
If anything, we should be attentive to this. We should be careful not to marginalise questions of power, because in wearing that aura of clean objectivity, metascience risks becoming strangely depoliticised. And we should be humble enough to learn from non-Western traditions about their knowledge systems, whether they survived pre-colonisation or struggle now to exist outside Western norms, as we see in Indigenous communities worldwide.
Let us remember something important. Many civilisations have lived on this earth. They established many of the fundamentals that we use in modern science. But with all their material interests and their own flaws and failures, none of these civilisations grew in a way that caused an ecological crisis for the whole planet. That is unique to the form of economic growth that emerged with modernity.
The metrics of growth, the endless expansion, the treatment of nature as a resource to be extracted, these are built into the system we now inhabit. If we tinker only with funding models and reproducibility, we leave the engine untouched.
Call it the science of science. Call it research on research. Call it better science 2.0. Call it metascience. I don’t have a lot of affinity for the name. I started my fellowship two weeks ago. I’m here for the questions.
What matters is what questions we ask, and what questions we leave out. We should question the root and go deeper into the system. Tangible action on the surface will only create more problems as time goes on. Any real reform should start at the root.
As Rana Dajani puts it so sharply in Reimagining Systems Change:
“Addressing societal issues has moved past the point of ‘fixing’ the system that is in place. In many instances, the system in place cannot be ‘fixed’ because it is not truly ‘broken’. It is acting according to its design.”
The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. It is designed to produce certain kinds of knowledge, funded in certain ways, published in certain journals, using certain vocabularies. And it is designed not to ask certain questions. That is the trap that metascience should avoid. I hope that we, as the first cohort of this fellowship, will hopefully carry all these questions with us as we ask our own.
