I was wondering how this book would be received by professional social scientists, and the first answer is out. A review from Jonathan Adams in Nature (May 2016, here) seems to find it an interesting project and a “refreshing description”. He really appreciates the need to find better ways to help evolve the careers in science, and new opportunities it opens. It’s nice to see he enjoyed reading it, even though it intersects so directly with his professional research space.

On the other side he hopes to read more about misuse of metrics. I’m really not convinced that pleas like the Declaration on Research Assessment or the Leiden Manifesto have much effect on the huge pressures I describe that bear down on the science ecosystem. They urge caution in a world that we all know about, but don’t do anything to address the realities of why this arises from the ecosystem as I discuss it. But I agree it is of course important to state these issues with metrics, and try provide guidance.

It would be extremely interesting to understand more about how conferences do or do not drive different parts of science. Hence the need to collect more evidence on this, see the survey starting to gain large numbers of respondents – start here !

While it is interesting to have scientists read the book, I am more keen that it is science administrators, funders, politicians, industrialists, entreprenuers, publishers and all those who navigate around this system who start to pick up on it. This is the real audience I would like to influence, and they have never before had a high level overview of how science really works!