Postmodern research
What “the system” is
In a recent post I made a very basic representation of the evil circle of grants and papers. This inspired me to draw a bigger diagram to show how postmodern research works. I say postmodern1 because, as I seem to understand from older colleagues, it has not always been like this and things were quite different say, 20 years ago. Or maybe the structure of things was quite similar but the attitude was way more relaxed and the pace way lower.
It is my pleasure to introduce a brand new diagram representation of the postmodern research system a.k.a. the research spaghetti monster.
Let’s break this down.
The evil circle, magnified
First we take a closer look at our acquaintaince, the evil circle of grants and papers. It’s pretty simple. It’s a vicious circle where it’s difficult to enter, but once you are inside, then it can really bring you in an upward spyral of outstanding achievements. Well, until you keep feeding it anyway. So let’s start somewhere, maybe with the grant money.
Grant money is needed to run a project, as the critical mass of a dedicated project is usually needed to make some breakthroughs, and get some great results publishable in a top journal. Papers in top journals are needed for a strong CV, that needs to be stronger and stronger to get (more, and bigger) grant money. When the project is small and maybe not-so-prestigious, the results are good but not-really-amazing, the papers published in second- or third-choice-journals, the CV just-fine… then the loop weakens, and this is not good. If you break the circle you end up with no money, and no papers. This is what is commonly known as the publish or perish situation. Which in postmodern research terms I would rather redefine as project (funded) or perish situation.
Note two important aspects here. One is the closed loop on grant money. Yes, grants bring you more grants, for various reasons. This is also referred to as the Matthew effect, which in research basically means those who are successfull in getting grant money will get even more of these money. And it’s a real thing.
The other aspect is the element of chance, that here I sympatically call luck. I placed it right in the middle because it plays a central role. This is also what people who take themselves very seriously usually call “success”, and indeed, sometimes the two things are indistinguishable. Why is luck such a central element here? Because you can be lucky and apply to a call where all the others have sent weak proposals, or find a favourably biased reviewer, or catch a flight and get to sit next to a person who runs an investment fund. And viceversa of course when you are unlucky - which is basically the business as usual case. Everybody needs (quite some) luck in this system, whether they believe it or not.
Oh, God…
…give us courage to change what can be changed… Talking about beliefs, here a little parallel with the serenity prayer to introduce the second block of the postmodern research system, the part where one can play an active role and is not at the mercy of others and chance. Let’s call this the homo faber fortunae suae subsystem, which includes ideas generation and skill development.
Ideas, ah, I wish I had many of those. But ideas don’t grow on trees, and some are just not good. Especially new ideas are needed to get grant money. Because research projects always need a strong element of novelty. Unfortunately, there is so much postmodern research today that it’s very likely somebody else just had the same good idea as you. But as long as they are not in your scientific domain or even discipline, you might get away with this. Related to this, there is the risk of scooping, i.e. others taking your ideas. So one needs to keep the new ideas close, but also share them enough to get them validated and improved, etc. It’s complicated. Sometimes, people just recycle old ideas and give them a bit of polishing or rebranding - with some luck these can become a new trend (somebody just said circular economy???). New ideas can directly lead to top papers, because with some luck one might not necessarily need much grant money for publishing, and therefore shortcut the circuit.
We need to make a distinction between soft and hard skills. It’s important. Both are needed for postmodern research. One can be good at data analysis or coding, but if one can’t deliver a pitch to a funder or write a proposal, it will be very, very difficult to get the grant money… So hard skills is what gets the scientific breakthroughts and soft skills is what gets…all the rest. Managing dissemination and communication that give exposure, writing exciting top papers, drafting convincing proposals for grant money, and making good connections that build a network. Examples of soft skills include being good at: languages, writing basically anything in different styles, talking (and small-talking), communicating clearly and to different audiences, explaining complex research in simple terms, negotiating, making friends, making and keeping the right connections, understanding social dynamics, politics, and bureucracy and even some legal stuff, avoiding and managing conflicts, making budgets, etc. etc. etc. the list is huge.
The common point here is that one can develop both ideas and skills, train and get better, while one can’t change…
The outer world
That’s just something one must deal with. And here we come to the fourth block, the outer world subsystem, that usally needs to be maximized (a weird term, that coincidentally sounds like something that a person with my first name would do).
Both breakthroughs and top papers can give a lot of exposure, if one has the skills to disseminate and communicate the research to wider audiences and to key people and fora. Having good exposure allows to enlarge the network. This because, when your research gets on the media, suddenly many people will contact you on LinkedIn to be your friends (it’s called connections…), propose collaborations (that might implicitly require you work for free), or just try to get a bit of your shine. And if you additionally have luck they migh even want to give you money.
But network beats exposure any day, if you ask me. Those who have the right connections, will get more grant money. Let’s not be naive. And one needs skills to build a network, as I wrote above. This can be facilitated by having grant money. For example, in my case joining collaborative research projects has always been a great opportunity to meet many new clever, skilled, interesting and well-connected people.
The support function
For lack of a better name, the institutional subsystem is the last block and it’s about time because this post is way too long. Two elements. The infrastructure is key to get grant money and gives a lot of competitive advantage. This is the organisation behind you, university or research centre, the people good at supporting with fundraising, networking, understanding the calls, making budgets, supporting with project management and communication, as well as its physical infrastructure including labs, computing power, software, technicians. And having good colleagues and non-toxic, reasonably competitive (“in a healthy way”) resarch environment that can give freedom to develop new ideas or just sign a support letter when needed, and share knowledge and help training skills.
What about politics what is this doing here? Well but this is the alfa and omega of the whole story. If the government, or the European Commmission, decides that now it’s time to boost the research on Artificial Intelligence, then that’s THE priority and driving force for the entire circus. That’s the highway for funneling the grant money, and everybody will run there. If they decide that there will be a funding round on the theme “green transition” then be sure that many will take some old proposals out of the drawer and spin them (somebody would say greenwash…) to fit in. And what about the huge companies driving the research agenda with their private research funds? Another example of how politics drives the system. And anybody who has worked in a big organisation knows that there is a lot of internal politics on distributing resources (read: money) and deciding who goes ahead in the career ladder and when. So I don’t need to say much more here I think.
The fourth dimension
There is one thing to mention though, which makes this entire system quite insane: the speed. Everything here happens on steroids, at high pace. But this is something for another post.
Welcome to the postmodern research system.
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Originally I had used the term modern. One week after posting this, however, a colleague of mine gave an interview in Forskerforum (in danish) describing in a very critical way the problems with research today (universities as consultancy houses insanely focused on funding aquisition) compared to research a couple of decades ago (more free research time). He uses the term postmodern in the interview, and perhaps it is more appropriate. ↩