Introducing ARRC

Liz Simmonds and Steven Wooding are co-PIs on a newly-launched study - the Action Research on Research Culture (ARRC) Project, which is being carried out in association with the Bennett Institute, at which Steven is an affiliated researcher. Liz and Steven bring a complementary set of expertise to the study; Liz has had an extensive career in HR and careers support. As Assistant Head of the Postdoc Academy, she led the development of the university’s research culture agenda. Steven is a policy researcher with an interest in understanding and evaluating decision-making and assessment in academia, and translating research findings into actionable change.

Here Liz and Steven discuss what led them to design this project; a unique collaboration between the Human Resources Division, the Research Strategy Office, in association with the Bennett Institute, aiming to be at the forefront of positive change in academic culture.

Liz, Discussions are gathering pace on how we can collectively take action on longstanding issues in academic culture, many of which affect the whole sector. How has your experience brought you here?

Liz: I’ve worked in roles supporting postdocs and the research environment for more than fifteen years, and one of the things that repeatedly struck me was how often postdocs would tell me they wanted a career in academia despite all the problems. Despite long hours, a competitive environment, challenging working relationships, and a great deal of uncertainty about their long-term career prospects. This was something echoed by colleagues at other institutions. For a long time, I worked on projects and initiatives that aimed to address some of these challenges: a careers service for postdocs, professional development support for academic careers, creating networks and communities to support them both within and beyond Cambridge.

In 2018, the talk shifted, and many of these areas I’d had an interest in started to come together under the umbrella term #researchculture (I use the hashtag because, back then, a lot of the discussion and networking was taking place on social media, among interested parties, rather than officially within our institutions, and somehow it just stuck). The Royal Society’s ‘Changing Expectations’ conference was a watershed moment for me: it was the first time I’d been in a room with such a diverse bunch of stakeholders, funders, researchers, policy makers, communicators, and we were openly admitting that research could be a bit of a rubbish place to work. And we were also agreeing that we needed to do something about it. I was excited and motivated: could we reach a place where those postdocs told me they wanted a career in academia because of what an amazing place it was to work? The key question was what should be done? What would work?

Steven, how does your role as a policy researcher influence your perspective on research culture?

Steven: I’ve spent my career bringing evidence into policymaking – doing research to answer the questions that policy makers have, and trying to anticipate the questions policy makers will need to ask. Much of that work has been research on research: understanding the value of the outputs of research to make the case for research funding[1]; working out the good ways to capture the outcomes of research[2]; understanding the implications of mobility for researchers[3]; looking at how best to fund research[4]. The answers often aren’t obvious. For example, there is an ongoing debate about whether adding a lottery element to research funding – so the decision is partly randomised - can improve funding decisions. Which seems unlikely when you first hear about it, but there is mounting evidence that it can help reduce bias, reduce bureaucracy and increase the novelty of research[5]. 

Lots of people have ideas for how to improve #researchculture[6],[7],[8], but there isn’t much evidence on what works, or doesn’t, and why. That’s what I find exciting about this project: we’re building an evidence base, and we have a remit to take that evidence to policy makers as it emerges.

Which aspects of research culture is this project planning to address? How did you decide on these?

Liz: As the first strand of our project, choosing to look at the potential effects of narrative CVs was easy – right now they’re a real hot topic in the sector. A narrative CV asks candidates to describe their contributions to the research environment in a much broader context than the traditional format CV. The hope is that by asking candidates to evidence aspects of their professional lives (such as how they support and manage others, and how they contribute to their research communities) they will be selected for more than just their publications, and this will translate in to a research community that values a more holistic view of research, hiring those whose leadership will improve the culture over time.

UKRI are committed to adopting narrative CVs across all their funding programmes, and want to support their use in other recruitment and assessment processes, from hiring new lecturers to applying for professional chartered status. They’re being widely considered in other European countries, which will affect our globally mobile researchers. It seems the format(s) is/are here to stay, so it’s important we understand what effect they have on recruitment of researchers. What we do know so far, is that preparing and reviewing these unfamiliar formats places quite an additional time burden on researchers. What we need to understand is whether this additional effort is balanced by evidence of a potential positive change to research culture.

Steven: It’s easy to see how narrative CVs could change priorities in recruitment – and making researchers wider contributions clearer should reduce the emphasis on grants and publications. But a more discursive format might favour those who are better at writing, rather than those who are better at research. The context is also important – in recruitment, CVs are normally viewed alongside covering letters, so we’ll test them like that. We are going to compare how recruiters shortlist when reviewing covering letters with standard CVs versus narrative CVs – both by talking to recruiting researchers and by analysing the shortlists produced.

So once we’ve moved past the hiring process, what else is an important concern?

Liz: Our second project strand looks at how we can better support researchers and those who manage them to have good conversations that support professional development. As a careers adviser, I often met researchers who didn’t seem to be getting the support they needed from their managers, whether it was time to discuss how the project was going, help with wider career objectives or perhaps delicate conversations around aspects like authorship or ownership of research ideas. I’m not personally an advocate of the once-a-year appraisal, which can so often become formulaic, and gets people off the hook from properly supporting their staff. But I also acknowledge, as a manager of people myself, that good people management takes time. How can we use different tools and approaches – I’m talking 360s, action learning sets, mentoring and other approaches, to better support regular conversations?

Steven: The challenge for researchers with limited time and budget is knowing which tools might be most valuable. We can’t expect researchers to be experts in the variety of tools and approaches for improving developmental conversations – but we hope they can recognise ‘good’ when they see it. We’re going to ask groups of researchers to try out pairs of tools to give us pairwise comparisons. Then we’ll pull together what they tell us to provide other researchers with recommendations of the best tools for their circumstances.

Do you think this project addresses the most prominent concerns of researchers working in academia today? 

Liz: If you ask researchers what the worst aspects of research culture are, you won’t get far before someone mentions fixed-term contracts. Most postdocs are on short-term contracts – usually 2-3 years, but it could be anything from 3 months to 5 years. There’s an expectation one should move around (and therefore on) after a contract ends, but this instability creates a real precarity in research careers that we know leads to all sorts of issues around wellbeing, mental health and even affects aspects like creativity in research. It’s a big problem, that’s not easy to solve within the confines of a research project like ARRC, so what we decided to do was to progress the conversation.

Steven: While there is a general sense that precarity is a problem, we don’t have the evidence to ‘stress test’ possible solutions. Therefore, we don’t know what researchers would trade-off for increased security, for example having less control over their precise area of research. We’re going to answer that need by surveying researchers using a technique called ‘Discrete Choice’ that allows us to explore how they trade-off between different aspects of their career options.

Research Culture affects the academy as a whole. How will you engage with the wider sector on this project?

Liz: While we’re conducting our experiments with researchers, we’ll also be working in parallel to develop a full understanding of what research culture means, and doing this with an international flavour. Our partner universities – University of Edinburgh, Leiden University, Freie Universität Berlin and ETH Zurich – are helping us to make connections that will build our understanding of what research culture encompasses in other countries, what the priorities are, and what other solutions could be promising.

What are your hopes for the future of this project, and beyond?

Moving forward with this work, we hope that our complimentary expertise (and that of our multi-disciplinary team) will allow us to approach this project from numerous angles, gathering a rich view of where research culture stands and interventions that will stand us in good stead for the future. There are other issues that we could examine, but the three we have chosen capture important developments happening now, and allow us to hear from the researchers about their feelings and concerns. We also hope this project will contribute to a wider conversation, and spark similar research elsewhere. We’re excited for where this work will take us; we definitely feel like we’re standing at a turning point for positive change in research culture.