ArticleMinerva
Unsustainable Growth, Hyper-Competition, and Worth in Life Science Research: Narrowing Evaluative Repertoires in Doctoral and Postdoctoral Scientists' Work and Lives.
Article in Minerva. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Working With Value Complexity in Healthcare.Qualitative health research · 2026Article
- The Shifting 'Self' of Science's Self-Governing Capacity: Four Decades of Research Integrity Discussions inSocial studies of science · 2026Article
- Orientation work: caring for the relevance of research to social-environmental problems.Science as culture · 2025Article
- Diving into Relevance: How Deep Sea Researchers Articulate Societal Relevance within their Epistemic Living Spaces.Minerva · 2025Article
- Embedded Ethics in Practice: A Toolbox for Integrating the Analysis of Ethical and Social Issues into Healthcare AI Research.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Article
- Governing beyond the project: Refocusing innovation governance in emerging science and technology funding.Social studies of science · 2024Article
- From 'making lists' to conducting 'well-rounded' studies: Epistemic re-orientations in soil microbial ecology.Social studies of science · 2024Article
- Relational responsibilities: Researchers perspective on current and progressive assessment criteria: A focus group study.PloS one · 2024Article
- Innovation in Technology Instead of Thinking? Assetization and Its Epistemic Consequences in Academia.Science, technology & human values · 2024Article
- Effective communications strategies to increase the impact of environmental health research.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2023Article
- Luck and the 'situations' of research.Social studies of science · 2023Article
- Article
- RESPONSE_ABILITY A Card-Based Engagement Method to Support Researchers' Ability to Respond to Integrity Issues.Science and engineering ethics · 2022Article
- Adopting Safe-by-Design in Science and Engineering Academia: The Soil May Need Tilling.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Proxyeconomics, a theory and model of proxy-based competition and cultural evolution.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Getting funded in a highly fluctuating environment: Shifting from excellence to luck and timing.PloS one · 2022Article
- Renting Valuable Assets: Knowledge and Value Production in Academic Science.Science, technology & human values · 2021Article
- Article
- Regionalization in elderly care: what makes up a healthcare region?Journal of health organization and management · 2020Article
- Allonymous science: the politics of placing and shifting credit in public-private nutrition research.Life sciences, society and policy · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and "hyper-competition." Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior researchers are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions of these issues are much less frequently considered. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between how research is valued and how young researchers learn to live, work and produce knowledge within academia. We thus analyze how PhD students and postdocs in the Austrian life sciences ascribe worth to people, objects and practices as they talk about their own present and future lives in research. We draw on literature from the field of valuation studies and its interest in how actors refer to different forms of valuation to account for their actions. We explore how young researchers are socialized into different valuation practices in different stages of their growing into science. Introducing the concept of "regimes of valuation" we show that PhD students relate to a wider evaluative repertoire while postdocs base their decisions on one dominant regime of valuing research. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the epistemic and social development of the life sciences, and for other scientific fields.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.