26 July: great review in Times Higher Education

I am greatly encouraged by a strongly supportive review from Harry Collins in the Times Higher Education (here), which chooses it as their book of the week. Harry is an eminent social scientist who I have followed for a number of years, because he is interested in how science is done. However since he studies what was until recently an esoteric backwater (gravitational wave detection), I have disagreed on much of the general applicability of his work. However we certainly agree on the need to look at how science is actually done!

You can see the full thing here: THES

19 July: nice review in Science

Great to see that also the review in Science really likes the book.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/07/17/the-secret-life-of-science/
Some interesting comments about wanting more details on solutions to the current state of science – readers really want to know how I might change everything, but I the route to that is first collective thought about what we do. Being prescriptive is not a way forward that is possible.

24 May: Nature review!

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!

23 May Launch!

A welcome collection of friends, family, senior university academics and staff, and young researchers joined me to officially launch The Secret Life of Science. It’s hard to know what to emphasise among the many things discussed in the book, but I choose the double edge sword of globalisation. It’s not always good, particularly if it reduces the diversity of funding and producing good science. It is amazing to realise that this has been over five years of journey, and I have been so supported by so many people along the way. Thanks all!