GoKawiilPerspectives on questions such as the availability of research funding and what leads to impactful science varied widely in the Nature Index survey.Credit: Evgeniy Shkolenko/iStock via Getty
A leading research career is influenced by many factors: a researcher’s interests, yes, but also funding conditions, institutional expectations and the often-shifting priorities, policies and attitudes of wider society. Add into that mix the complexity and pressures of today’s interconnected global science system, and it’s clear that the research itself is just one aspect determining success — albeit by far the most important one.
Against this background of institutional, structural and cultural influences, what is stopping researchers from reaching greater heights? Where would they like to see changes that enable them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow? And is there any divergence between their perceptions and the reality of current trends in research?
Research Leaders survey white paper
To examine some of these questions in more detail, Nature Research Intelligence, which manages the Nature Index database, surveyed more than 6,000 authors of articles published since 2020 in the high-quality natural- and health-science journals tracked by the index (see ‘Who was surveyed and how?’). This ‘Research Leaders’ survey — which invited responses from a representative sample of authors across regions and disciplines, and was analysed by demographic factors, such as gender and research experience — reveals exactly how some of the world’s most successful scientists view the research landscape at present. Further results are also available in a ‘white paper’ report on the Nature Index site.
Perceptions of impact
One major focus of the survey was research impact, whether in the ‘academic’ sense of scientists reading and citing one another’s work — types of impact that have a long history of being tracked in global science — or in a wider societal and economic context. The results suggest that there is substantial variation in how measures of impact are viewed by leading researchers.
Respondents were asked, for instance, which three factors they thought contribute most strongly to a research paper achieving high academic impact. Across the survey, “novel, innovative and original findings” was cited most frequently (selected by 84% of Nature Index authors as one of their top three factors), followed by research being “rigorous and methodologically robust” (70%). Publishing in a high-impact journal was chosen by 39% of all survey participants; 29% cited the availability of open-access publishing and 27% pointed to research being interdisciplinary or intersectoral. Confirming or replicating previous findings was selected least often, with just 15% of all respondents identifying it as a contributor to high academic impact.
Breaking these results down by seniority, using the number of papers published by the respondents as a proxy for experience, reveals clear differences in how impact is understood (see ‘Fresh perspectives’). The more experience researchers had, the more likely they were to prioritize journal prestige and methodological rigour. Among those who had authored more than 100 papers since 2020, almost half selected publishing in a high-impact journal — something usually determined using an ‘impact factor’ or average citation rate for the journal — as a top-three factor, compared with just under one-third of respondents who had authored one to five papers. Similarly, three-quarters of those with the highest publishing rate highlighted methodological rigour, compared with two-thirds of the group with the least experience.
Junior researchers, by contrast, placed greater emphasis on open access. Among respondents with up to ten papers, around one-third selected the availability of open-access research as a key contributor to impact, compared with 21% of those with 51–100 papers and 20% of those with more than 100 publications.
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