Ryazanova finds that disciplines reliant on physical infrastructure/materials and those generating high-value IP favor organized scientific research. Photo: COURTESY OF OLGA RYAZANOVA

In recent years, countries around the world have established national laboratories and launched major scientific initiatives, investing heavily to gain an edge in global technological competition. This model of organized scientific research—marked by high levels of coordination, systematic planning, and intensive resource allocation—has become a central pillar of innovation policy worldwide. It plays a vital role in tackling pressing challenges such as the energy transition, environmental change, artificial intelligence, and advances in the life sciences—issues that are shaping the future of humanity. Yet how does this collective approach compare with the traditional “lone-wolf” model of individual research? And how can we ensure that organized scientific research, with the interdisciplinary collaboration it demands, operates effectively? To explore these questions, CSST spoke with Olga Ryazanova, associate dean for Strategy and Governance at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Maynooth University, Ireland. 

Decreasing efficiency of individual research in some disciplines 

CSST: How do you define organized scientific research and individual research? Why is the organized model gaining traction? 

Ryazanova: “Organized scientific research” is defined as lab-based/project-based research, led by Primary Investigator(s), with a team of researchers involved through a formal governance structure, and “individual research” is defined as research activity led by an individual on their own or perhaps with co-authors, but without a formal research team structure. 

There are several pragmatic reasons why organized research has become a dominant mode of knowledge production in some scientific disciplines, and why other disciplines still predominantly rely on individual research production. 

First and foremost, as the sophistication of scientific endeavor increased, the requirements for expensive and complicated equipment made individual-based research impractical in some disciplines, such as the natural sciences. From the perspective of research management, the higher the investment into scientific equipment and facilities, the more funders would like to see it justified by high output. There is only so much that an individual researcher can do, even if every minute of their working day is spent on research. Consequently, research groups have become more effective and efficient as a way to use equipment in a coordinated manner to achieve funders’ objectives. 

A second, related reason is the emergence of control systems within academic research sector. These systems seek to ensure accountability for the money spent on academic research by taxpayers or private funders, and prevent misuse, especially where funding is related to specific project objectives. These legitimate purposes, however, created an extensive and highly complex layer of reporting, which often requires almost as much time to manage as the scientific research itself. Individual researchers no longer had time to do both research and reporting on their own, and substantial economies of scale emerged where reporting could be centralized for an organized group of researchers. 

Thirdly, in a similar way, where scientific research dealt with issues of national security, ensuring protection of sensitive IP was more effective and efficient in organized groups of researchers, rather than with individual researchers. This reason was particularly prominent when countries competed on the strength of their scientific and technological innovation. This added a key political dimension to research, and offered very generous funding to prioritized research programs, which came at the cost of highly controlled, centralized structures. 

To summarize—not every academic discipline has adopted organized research (or even research co-produced in informal co-authorship teams). However, disciplines which are highly dependent on physical infrastructure and materials, and those producing IP of high applied value have found organized research to be a preferred mode of knowledge production, given the constraints that they are facing. 

Maximizing research’s visibility and impact

CSST: In your view, what are the advantages of organized scientific research compared to individual inquiry? What are some of the limitations of individual research that collective efforts can overcome? 

Ryazanova: As I mentioned above, the benefits of organized research can vary across academic disciplines. For some disciplines, especially those highly dependent on external project-based funding, the burdens of reporting and procurement are hard to manage without some form of grouping to centralize these functions. Other disciplines can effectively rely on their universities’ central services (such as libraries and departmental administrative teams) to provide necessary support for individual research. 

However, even in disciplines which used to be mostly self-reliant, such as business and management, we now see the strong trend toward co-authored research, with co-authorship teams getting larger. This is a response to increased pressures to publish in prestigious journals and increased competition for spaces in those journals. Additional co-authors bring skills, knowledge, and social capital to the team, making it easier to produce publishable research. At the moment, these collaborations are largely informal and rely on personal relationships and social reciprocity. As the academic environment becomes more challenging and pressure to perform grows, we might see the emergence of more formal structures, where team members’ research activities in relation to a particular topic are defined by their contract rather than their interest. In other words, academics might consider that it is more effective to hire a research fellow to work on a project rather than relying on co-authorship with a colleague who might be busy with their own research pipeline. Having an organized team, in theory, ensures the alignment of motivation to perform and reduces coordination costs. 

Another substantial benefit of organized research is the ability of the team to achieve higher visibility of research more quickly, due to both the higher volume of produced research and the combined effect of social capital of team members. The diversity of knowledge, skills, and connections within an organized team can be particularly useful when scientific research needs to be co-created with and disseminated to non-academic external stakeholders. Not many individual researchers can effectively combine deep disciplinary expertise and the ability to engage with the broad range of non-specialist audiences. Even fewer have time to do novel and excellent research and maintain connections with different stakeholders. The division of labor within the team can be vital for the ability of a research project to maximize its impact. 

Building connections across disciplinary silos 

CSST: What are your suggestions for ensuring the effectiveness of organized scientific research and the interdisciplinary collaboration it entails? 

Ryazanova: Overall, it is useful to remember that scientific research is a combination of art and craft: it is a creative profession that requires skills (often highly advanced and precise) to implement our ideas. Consequently, it requires the right conditions for creativity to emerge and the right environment for effective implementation. The latter is mostly about infrastructure—physical and digital, and about high-quality research training. The former is about performance pressures, workloads, and ability to spend uninterrupted, focused time thinking about research. 

We should try to create workloads that allow (on a regular basis) some focused time for thinking about research. We should also acknowledge the toll that inherent uncertainty of research performance (experiments that do not work, papers and grant applications that get rejected) takes on researchers. 

If interdisciplinary collaborations are necessary for the success of a research program, the first challenge is usually to build connections across disciplinary silos, and the second challenge is to make sure these connections are maintained and deliver results. To address the first challenge, physical co-location of researchers from different disciplines is a strategy that shows consistently good results over time. If scientists meet informally on a regular basis, they eventually learn more about each other’s skills and interests, and interdisciplinary collaborations start to form. 

Unfortunately, some of those collaborations are short-lived, because disciplinary norms dictate which types of performance outcomes are acceptable, and often do not permit any deviations. As a hypothetical (and rather extreme) example, if one discipline only accepts publications in a narrow range of prestigious journals, and the other only accepts published monographs, it might be difficult to find a solution that works for both disciplines, because the types of research methods can vary substantially depending on expected final output. 

The solution to this tension might be to decouple performance evaluation of interdisciplinary projects from disciplinary norms, and make sure that the main focus is on the final impact that the project seeks to make through its activities, rather than immediate outputs from it. 

CSST: Are you familiar with the “organized scientific research” initiative launched by China’s Ministry of Education? Could you share your thoughts on it and how it compares with the Western model? 

Ryazanova: My understanding of China’s Ministry of Education’s “organized scientific research” initiative is that it seeks to align research within Chinese universities with the national science and technology agenda and increase investment into specific prioritized areas. 

I do not think there exists one “Western model” with which this initiative can be compared. For example, the ways in which research funding is allocated in the United Kingdom is different from other countries within the European Union or from countries in North America. That said, it is common for governments to have science and technology priorities and channel funding towards prioritized areas. 

To some extent, this is a reasonable strategy. Research agendas can be influenced by targeted funding, because scientists are at least partly motivated by job opportunities, financial rewards, and ability to scale up their research programs. There is also strong empirical evidence that an overall increase in funding leads to higher research performance, at least, if the funding actually reaches the scientists it was allocated for.

The key tension is usually in finding the balance between project-based funding (which is typically linked to prioritized areas) and block funding, which is allocated to universities for all kinds of basic and applied research. When block funding is increased, policymakers are always tempted to give money “with strings attached” and to monitor the return on investment in the short term. Unfortunately, applying venture capitalists’ logic to academic researchers does not lead to higher productivity, but instead makes researchers more insecure and anxious about their jobs. This then leads to a focus on individual credentials over group performance, making team members more like “disbanded soldiers.” Scientists need job security and long-term stability in research funding, because it may take a long time for an outcome of their work to emerge, especially if the questions they are asking are truly original and bold. It takes on average 10 years for a piece of scientific evidence to be cited in policy documents. It takes a similar amount of time for a new pharmaceutical drug to be approved. 

Basic science inherently has a high element of unpredictability. Not only it is hard to predict which of the novel solutions would work, but also the application of scientific developments can be found in unexpected areas. It is difficult, therefore, to establish a linear connection between applied technological priorities and basic science, or to predict when basic science might deliver a vital stepping stone for an applied solution. In addition, where a solution is required for a serious societal problem, it is likely to emerge from a multiplicity of the disciplines. This makes alignment of basic research with a narrow science and technology agenda even more challenging. 

Edited by LIU YUWEI