How do we get the most out of scientific research? Metascience could provide the answers.

In April 2024, the world’s first government-embedded metascience unit, which is based in the UK, launched its inaugural £5 million grant programme intended to turn science on itself. Instead of funding traditional studies into natural or human phenomena, it aimed to support research about research - metascience. 

In recent years, metascience has gone mainstream. What was once a largely academic pursuit now more actively influences government policy. Understanding how research works is important because science has so much impact on our lives, from vaccines to computers. Could metascience’s transition from academia to practice open the door in 2025 to better and more effective solutions to social problems? 

Metascience includes some surprising ideas. One is funding by variance where decisions about grants are made based upon the difference between reviewers’ scores rather than who gets the highest score. Only ideas that some love and others hate - “Marmite science” - would qualify. The aim is to support unorthodox proposals that challenge norms.

The US National Science Foundation is already considering something similar called golden tickets. Under this model, each reviewer can override one decision per funding cycle, allowing unusual or risky ideas to pass, even if most reviewers dislike them.

Metascience isn’t just about new funding models or even new ways of producing science. It examines the entire research system, from university departments to industry laboratories.

There are growing concerns that good ideas are getting harder to find and that research is getting less novel. For example, over the 20th century, the average age of Nobel Prize winners has increased by five years, more than would be expected due to the population ageing. This suggests that people are having to learn more for longer to be at the scientific frontier. 

There is also some evidence that research productivity has fallen, meaning that more work is needed for each new breakthrough. That said, artificial intelligence (AI) may help reverse that trend - recent research in materials science found that AI improved scientists’ productivity. 

In richer countries, economic growth is harder to obtain from more education, more machines or more infrastructure because those places have already maxed out. The biggest opportunities lie in innovation, creating better machines and new solutions. Declining research productivity therefore potentially threatens economic growth. Metascience offers the opportunity to understand how to better undertake and organise research which can boost innovation and keep the economy ticking over. 

It’s not just about economics. Research also helps to improve health, education, the environment and many other aspects of life. The Covid-19 vaccines were generated through research and resulted in huge improvements in human welfare. Better understanding of how research works through metascience might help improve lives by making fields such as medical or environmental science work better.

Another challenge is that the way science is organised hasn't changed all that much in richer countries since the end of World War II. Metascience could create more responsive research systems by experimenting with new techniques and spreading the most successful ones. Organisations such as the Research on Research Institute and Nesta’s Innovation Growth Lab are already undertaking work in this area. 

Metascience can also promote diversity. Another novel way of making decisions about grants is partially randomised funding where lotteries are used to decide between high-quality proposals. This might reduce gender and racial bias when distributing research money as randomisation would help remove intentional and unintentional human prejudice. The technique has already been tried out by New Zealand's Health Research Council, the British Academy and Nesta, with some success. 

A more mundane reason we need metascience is that we are spending more on research. Real global spending on research has increased from $0.56 trillion in 1996 to $2.48 trillion in 2022, faster than the world economy has grown over that period. If companies, governments and charities are investing more then they’re going to want to make sure that they’re doing it in the right way and metascience can help with that.

Of course, metascience isn’t a magic bullet and has limitations. Using precious scientific budgets to investigate the process of research might be seen as self-indulgent. The potential impact of metascience on the economy or health is often indirect, uncertain and slow. And there are other more obvious ways of strengthening the economy and strengthening diversity such as improving the management of companies. 

One of science’s greatest strengths is that it is a work in progress. Rather than presenting a fixed view of the way the world works, it adapts to new evidence from experiments. Oddly, our system of supporting and conducting research is not so flexible. Through metascience, we can look forward in 2025 to making better choices about how we innovate - resulting in better health, more wealth and increased human wellbeing. Hopefully, that's something most people will love and no one will hate.