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Quality research needs good working conditions

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 164–167 (2023)Cite this article

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High-quality research requires appropriate employment and working conditions for researchers. However, many academic systems rely on short-term employment contracts, biased selection procedures and misaligned incentives, which hinder research quality and progress. We discuss ways to redesign academic systems, emphasizing the role of permanent employment.

Across disciplines, research quality benefits from transparency and openness, as well as efforts to replicate and reproduce. In recent years there has been a surge in open scholarship thanks to efforts towards promoting robust research grounded in the principles of good research practice, sparked primarily by individuals and grassroots approaches. Yet this movement is up against an academic structure with a high proportion of short-term contracts, precarious working conditions, misaligned incentives and unpaid labour, all of which pose barriers to high-quality research.

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Fig. 1: Overview of opportunities for designing academic systems to foster research quality.

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Acknowledgements

This work was conceived in the scope of the German Reproducibility Network (https://reproducibilitynetwork.de). We thank F. Henninger for his helpful comments, and L. Wagner and B. Heling for their help with formatting the document.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Behavioral Law & Economics, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany

    Rima-Maria Rahal

  2. Department Strategy & Innovation, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Susann Fiedler

  3. Department of Psychology, Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike, Abakaliki, Nigeria

    Adeyemi Adetula

  4. Laboratoire Interuniversitaire de Psychologie, Personnalité, Cognition, Changement Social, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

    Adeyemi Adetula

  5. Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Ronnie P.-A. Berntsson

  6. Wallenberg Centre for Molecular Medicine, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Ronnie P.-A. Berntsson

  7. QUEST Center for Responsible Research, Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany

    Ulrich Dirnagl

  8. Central Institute of Mental Health, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany

    Gordon B. Feld

  9. Department of Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Christian J. Fiebach

  10. Department of Psychology, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Samsad Afrin Himi

  11. Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK

    Aidan J. Horner

  12. York Biomedical Research Institute, University of York, York, UK

    Aidan J. Horner

  13. Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany

    Tina B. Lonsdorf

  14. Department of Psychology, LMU Munich, München, Germany

    Felix Schönbrodt

  15. Development, Individual, Process, Handicap, Education (DIPHE) Research Unit, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France

    Miguel Alejandro A. Silan

  16. Annecy Behavioral Science Lab, Menthon-Saint-Bernard, France

    Miguel Alejandro A. Silan

  17. Tübingen, Germany

    Michael Wenzler

  18. Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Flávio Azevedo

Authors
  1. Rima-Maria Rahal
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  2. Susann Fiedler
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  3. Adeyemi Adetula
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  4. Ronnie P.-A. Berntsson
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  5. Ulrich Dirnagl
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  6. Gordon B. Feld
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  7. Christian J. Fiebach
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  8. Samsad Afrin Himi
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  9. Aidan J. Horner
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  10. Tina B. Lonsdorf
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  11. Felix Schönbrodt
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  12. Miguel Alejandro A. Silan
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  13. Michael Wenzler
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  14. Flávio Azevedo
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Contributions

R.M.R., S.F., U.D. and C.J.F. conceived the work. R.M.R. wrote the original draft, and R.M.R., S.F., F.A., G.B.F., U.D., C.J.F., F.S., T.B.L., M.W., A.J.H., A.A., M.A.A.S., S.A.H. and R.P.A.B. reviewed and edited the Comment.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rima-Maria Rahal.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion, and Supplementary Figure 1

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Rahal, RM., Fiedler, S., Adetula, A. et al. Quality research needs good working conditions. Nat Hum Behav 7, 164–167 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01508-2

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