importance of scientific literature

Utilizing the Scientific Literature: The record of scientific progress

by Anne E. Egger, Ph.D., Anthony Carpi, Ph.D.

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Did you know that when scientists refer to the "literature," they are not talking about the works of Shakespeare? The scientific literature goes back to the 6th century BCE, when ancient Babylonians recorded lunar eclipses on clay tablets. Science builds on previous findings, so understanding how scientists utilize the scientific literature is key to understanding how science works.

The scientific literature provides an archive of research, which scientists make use of throughout the process of investigation.

Scientists reference the literature to indicate what other work has been done on a research topic, to cite sources of data that they use, and to show how their interpretations integrate with the published knowledge base of science.

New research questions can be investigated by reanalyzing or compiling data from the literature.

While individual scientists can make errors, the knowledge base of science as reflected in the scientific literature is self-correcting as new studies and new interpretations come to light.

Think about something you know and understand very well. Maybe you know everything about your favorite musical group, and when your friend asks you about them, you can list all of their songs and the band members' names and maybe even something about their history. Maybe you even predict when their next big hit will come out, based on what you know. Your friend asks how you know so much, and you admit that you read a book about them, and have all their albums, and you keep up on their tour dates on their web page. You've been to their concerts and seen them perform. You are referencing your sources, explaining how you know the facts, and why you are so comfortable making a prediction about them – and your friend trusts your knowledge and thus gives your opinion some weight.

Scientists use references in much the same way, drawing on available information to conduct their research . But unlike you when expressing your opinion about your favorite band, scientists are, in fact, obligated to provide the details about where they got that information. The scientific literature is designed to be a reliable archive of scientific research, providing a growing, stable base for new research investigations. When scientists present their new ideas and results to the community, they are expected to support their ideas with knowledge of the scientific literature and the work that has come before them. If they don't show their understanding of the literature, it's like you telling your friend that you love everything a particular band has done even though you've only heard one of their songs. In short, the scientific literature is of central importance to the growth and development of science as a whole.

• A brief history of scientific literature

In its earliest stages, the scientific literature took the form of letters, books, and other writings produced and published by individuals for the purpose of sharing their research . For example, the Babylonians recorded significant astronomical events like lunar eclipses on clay tablets as early as the 6th century BCE (see our Description in Scientific Research module). The notable scientist Alhazen from Basra, Iraq, hand-wrote a seven-volume treatise on his experiments in the field of optics while he was under house arrest in Cairo, Egypt, between 1011 and 1021 CE (see our Experimentation in Scientific Research module). Much of Galileo Galilei 's ground-breaking work was published as a series of letters, such as his Letters on Sunspots or the Letter to Grand Duchess Christina . Isaac Newton 's landmark Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published as a series of books in 1686, largely paid for from the personal fortune of the English astronomer Edmund Halley .

Today, although scientists still publish books and letters, the vast majority of the scientific literature is published in the form of peer reviewed journal articles, a practice that started in the mid-1600s. This means that the articles are reviewed by at least two scientists with expertise in the same area of science who comment on the article and decide whether it should be published. In March 1665, the Royal Society of London (see our Scientific Institutions and Societies module) began publishing Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London . The serial not only included a description of events that occurred at the weekly meetings of the Royal Society , but it also included results from scientific investigations conducted outside of the Royal Society meetings by its members. This publication was made available to other scientists as well as the general public, and thus it helped establish an archive of scientific research .

Other journals in which scientists could publish their findings appeared around the same time. The French Journal des sçavans (translated as Journal of the Savants – a "savant" is a member of a scholarly society) actually began publishing a few months before Philosophical Transactions but it did not carry scientific research reports until after (Figure 1). The Italian journal Saggi di naturali esperienzi ( Essays of natural experiments ) was first published in 1667 by the Accademia del Cimento in Florence. By the mid-18 th century, most major European cities had their own scientific society , each with its own scientific publication.

As the number of scientific journals expanded, they helped promote the progress of science itself. Whereas Newton had to seek a wealthy donor to fund the publication of his research , it was no longer the wealthiest or best-known individuals who had the ability to publish their findings. As a result, many more individuals were encouraged to take up the study of science and publish their own research. This in turn led to an explosion in the number of scientific studies that were conducted and the resulting knowledge that was generated from this research.

However, the expansion of the scientific literature also created challenges. As the knowledge base of science grew, it became more difficult to keep track of the discoveries that were made. By the 18 th century, many journals also included abstracts or short summaries of scientific research papers published in other journals so that their readers could stay current with the latest scientific advances.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush , an American scientist and statesman, highlighted the importance of the archive of research contained within the scientific literature when, in an essay first published in The Atlantic Monthly , he wrote, "A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted." Inspired by Bush's essay, Eugene Garfield, an American scientist, founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). In 1960, ISI introduced Science Citation Index , the first citation index for scientific scholarly journals. Science Citation Index makes use of the inherent linking characteristics of scientific papers: A single scientific paper contains citations to any number of earlier studies on which that work builds, and eventually it too is cited by future research studies. Thus, each published manuscript is one node in a network of citations. In making these networks explicit, Science Citation Index emphasizes a key aspect of the scientific literature – the way that it is continuously extended and builds on itself. Evidence that scientists consult that continuously growing record is seen in the reference list that accompanies every scientific journal article. Understanding how scientists utilize the scientific literature is a key component to understanding how science works.

• The scientific literature in practice

In a lecture discussing the connections between scientific writing and scientific discovery, Frederic Holmes, an American biologist and historian of science, has said:

When scientists refer to the "literature" of their fields, they have in mind something very different from what we mean when we talk of literature in general. The literature of a scientific specialty area is the accumulated corpus of research articles contained in the journals of the field, and it is regarded as the primary repository of the knowledge that defines the state of that field. (Holmes, 1987)

As Vannevar Bush noted, literature is useful only if it is consulted, and scientists must make it clear in their own work when they have, in fact, consulted that "accumulated corpus of research articles." You are probably familiar with the notion of citing sources, the way that, for example, a journalist indicates the experts that he or she consulted to write a news article. When scientists cite sources in their scientific journal articles, they are doing more than just showing which experts they consulted, however. Scientists consult the literature to learn all they can about a specific area of study, and then cite those articles to both acknowledge the authors as the originators of the idea they are discussing and also to help readers understand their line of reasoning in coming to their own conclusions.

Using the literature is an ongoing, iterative process for all scientists. For example, when beginning to conduct a geologic field investigation in the Warner Range in northeastern California, Anne Egger first did a search in GeoRef, a geosciences-themed database of journal articles, to see if anyone had published geologic maps or other investigations in this region. She did not want to duplicate any work that had already been done, and also wanted to see what information was already available. She first came across a paper published in 1986 by two geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey, in which they presented their work on determining the ages of volcanic rocks in the region (Duffield & McKee, 1986). These data would be very useful in understanding the volcanic history of the region. In addition, she used a technique that many scientists use when searching the literature: She consulted the reference list in the paper, as it provided a wealth of additional papers for her to search. One such paper was a publication entitled "Basin Range Structure and Stratigraphy of the Warner Range, Northeastern California," by Richard Joel Russell, published by the University of California Press in 1928. This appeared to be the first published scientific investigation in this region (Russell, 1928). The USGS geologists had added more detail to Russell's work, but only in the southern part of the range. Therefore, these and other resources helped Egger and her colleagues decide to focus on the central and northern parts of the range, where less was known about the geology. In addition, they helped define where there were still unanswered questions.

One such unanswered question was the origin of the sedimentary rock layers in the Warner Range (see Figure 2). Several geologists had noted the presence of granite cobbles in these sedimentary rock layers. Cobbles in general indicate that the sediments were deposited by a large river, but the presence of granite cobbles indicates something else: Although granite is common in other parts of California, there is none nearby, so they had to be carried a long distance by that ancient river. By looking at the age and chemical make-up of the granite cobbles, Egger and her colleagues could compare them to granite in other areas and try to determine where the cobbles came from. They collected data in the field and in the laboratory, eventually preparing a scientific journal article about the work they did, entitled "Provenance and paleogeographic implications of Eocene-Oligocene sedimentary rocks in the northwestern Basin and Range" (Egger, Colgan, & York, 2009).

The authors recognized that a number of different names had been applied to the sedimentary rocks they were investigating, and they wanted to make it clear to others how the terminology they were using fit into what others had done. In the excerpt that follows, they explain the historical progression of work in the region starting with the first investigation in 1928, and referring to articles along the way in order to show how their new work utilizes the previously established names:

The Warner Range exposes a thick sequence of ... sedimentary and volcanic rocks... The base of this sequence is primarily sedimentary and volcaniclastic; it was originally called the Lower Cedarville Formation by Russell (1928). Based on detailed field mapping in a portion of the range between Cedarville and Lake City, Martz (1970) subdivided the Lower Cedarville Formation into five units and mapped at least one unconformity within it. In their mapping of the South Warner Wilderness area between Granger Canyon and Eagleville, Duffield et al. (1976) did not subdivide the sedimentary sequence, though they alluded to the presence of at least three recognizable units based on composition, color, and vegetation. Myers (1998) and (2006) retained the nomenclature of Martz (1970) in paleofloral analyses of fossil assemblages in this sequence (Myers, 1998; 2006). Our new mapping in 2004 and 2005 confirmed the formation boundaries suggested by Martz (1970) and extended these subdivisions to the south between Cedar Pass and the South Warner Wilderness, and thus here we use those formation names. - from Egger et al., 2009

This explicit acknowledgment of other scientists' work shows that the authors examined the research archive in order to build on it, making use of the accumulated knowledge and understanding about the region in order to ask new questions about the sedimentary rocks. Later in the paper, the authors wanted to establish the age of the rocks they are describing. One kind of data that can help them make this determination is the fossils present in the rock, but these are not data they themselves collected. In this case, they cite papers where other scientists did look closely at the fossils:

The Steamboat Formation includes two fossiliferous layers... At its base north of Cedarville, a well-documented floral assemblage marks the transition from the latest Eocene to Oligocene (Myers, 2006). The fossils occur in a 1 m-thick ... siltstone that extends laterally (mainly to the south) approximately 7 km (Myers, 2006). ... [and] include ferns and conifers that occur throughout the sequence... - from Egger et al., 2009

Myers' data about the fossils helped establish the age of the sedimentary rocks (Eocene to Oligocene, about 35 million years old). Building on these existing data, Egger and her co-authors could then show what the rivers were like in the region during that time. One of the kinds of data that they collected in the field is paleocurrent indicators , or measurements that show which direction the currents that deposited the sediments were flowing. In this case, they measured the orientation of granite cobbles in a channel, called imbrication (see Figure 3).

Imbrication directions were largely consistent within a single ... channel, but varied as much as 180 degrees between different channels. Data from Cottonwood Canyon exemplify this relationship: 17 measurements in a channel near the base of the exposure show a strong paleocurrent direction towards the NW, while 16 measurements in a bed approximately 30 m stratigraphically higher in the sequence show a bit more variability with an average paleocurrent to the ESE (Fig. 2). While braided rivers tend to display more consistency in their paleocurrent directions, a spread in paleocurrent directions of 180° is expected in a coarse alluvial fan or alluvial plain (e.g. Miall, 1977). - from Egger et al., 2009

In the passage quoted above, the authors describe their own data (the measurements of the paleocurrent indicators), and then suggest a possible reason or interpretation for these data – that this large variability in the orientation of the cobbles is typical of a river that is very broad and steep – an alluvial plain . They cite Miall to indicate that he was the first person to describe the finding that a "spread in paleocurrent directions," or the fact that the cobbles were oriented in many directions, indicated the presence of a broad alluvial plain. Because he came to a similar conclusion in a different context, they are using the literature to find analogous situations and similar findings, to indicate that their interpretation is reasonable and show how it integrates into the existing research .

Throughout this paper and in scientific articles in general, the authors refer to the literature to do at least three key things: to indicate what other work has been done in the region or on the topic, to cite sources of data that they use, and to support their interpretation of the data (or show how their interpretation differs from previous interpretations). Citing these sources is an integral part of communicating research (see our Understanding Scientific Journals and Articles module for more information). Peer reviewers are usually familiar with the literature that authors are using, so one of their duties is to closely examine these references to see if the authors accurately describe their sources or if they missed any important sources (see our Peer Review module for more information about the peer review process).

Comprehension Checkpoint

• The literature as a data source

In some cases, the literature itself can serve as source for data collection. This has been the case in paleontology, for example, where many investigations over the past several hundred years have involved publishing descriptions of fossil localities, including which species and genera are present in different rock layers. In 1982, John Sepkoski Jr. published a compilation of data of when individual species of marine fossils first appear in the rock record , and when they are no longer seen in rocks. These data came from thousands of published reports (Sepkoski, 1982). In several earlier papers, Sepkoski had analyzed these compiled data and, based on that analysis , developed new ideas about taxonomic diversity through time (for example Sepkoski, 1979). In 1984, Sepkoski and his colleague David Raup published a controversial paper on the apparent regular occurrence of mass extinction events through time (Raup & Sepkoski, 1984), based entirely on the collection of data from the published literature. This type of analysis – often called meta-analysis – could not be done without the reliable archive of research provided by the scientific literature. Meta-analysis is especially useful in fields like medicine and climate science, where the results of studies with disparate methods can be combined to yield more robust results.

Of course, our knowledge and understanding of the natural world continue to evolve, inevitably revealing some mistakes in interpretation in the existing literature, as well as causing some material and ideas to become out of date. Sepkoski recognized this likelihood, and in 1993 he published a paper entitled "Ten Years in the Library: New Data Confirm Paleontological Patterns" (Sepkoski, 1993). In that article, he notes:

As soon as the manuscript for the 1982 Compendium went to press, I began discovering new and old paleontological literature that changed times of origination and extinction ... After publication..., the original data received special scrutiny from taxonomic experts, and embarrassing errors and promulgations of antiquated data were revealed.

Sepkoski collected the changes and reanalyzed the data . Interestingly, he found little difference in the conclusions about evolutionary patterns that he had published earlier (Sepkoski, 1993). For paleontology, this result has important implications. As Sepkoski states:

the major patterns of ... evolution are rather insensitive to new fossil discoveries and changes in taxonomic interpretation, indicating that analyses of transitory data can be robust, so long as a large component of the biosphere is being considered.

A similar conclusion can be drawn for the scientific literature as a whole, as well – though some mistakes get published, and our interpretations change, as a whole, the literature is robust and a reliable source of scientific data .

• Accessing the scientific literature

Staying current with the literature in one's field is a challenge – far more research is being published every day than is possible to read. Many journals now send out email notices to subscribers when a new issue comes out, including the table of contents and links to each of the articles. This allows scientists to quickly browse a new issue and see if there is an article of relevance to their work. Very often, however, scientists have seen or heard preliminary versions of published articles through presentations at meetings or other interactions with colleagues at different institutions (see our module on Scientific Institutions and Societies ).

Having access to the scientific literature is critical to "doing science." Today, digital and online databases make it easier for people to search the literature and sometimes to access scientific journal articles. Access to the vast majority of journals, however, even digital journals, is limited by subscription, which may run into the thousands of dollars. As a result, scientists at institutions without the resources to pay for these subscriptions are at a disadvantage (Evans & Reimer, 2009). More recently, many journals are providing open access to their content after a set time period, often a year, as in the case of Science magazine, and some provide open access from the very beginning, such as the Public Library of Science. This change reflects awareness that a diversity of viewpoints improves our scientific understanding, and that everyone should have access to the scientific literature.

The reason why access to the literature is so important is because it is a reliable archive of scientific research . The fact that it is reliable does not mean that every published paper is correct, but it means that progress in our understanding can be tracked through time. When mistakes or even fraud are discovered, a paper can be retracted, which removes it from the literature and ensures that the record continues to be reliable (see our module on Scientific Ethics ). In this way, earlier ideas can be built upon or refuted, and multiple lines of evidence can accumulate that help scientists establish the "big ideas" of science – robust theories like plate tectonics , atomic theory , and evolution .

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Searching the Scientific Literature

Literature of science.

• Initial Planning
• Subject Searching
• Citation Searching
• Scientific Subject Headings
• AND, OR, NOT (Boolean Operators)

Introduction

Scientific literature is the principal medium for communicating the results of scientific research and, as such, represents the permanent record of the collective achievements of the scientific community over time. This scientific knowledge base is composed of the individual "end products" of scientific research and discovery and continues to grow as new research builds on earlier research. This new research may add to, substantiate, modify, refine or refute existing knowledge on a specific topic. As a cycle new research and discovery in the laboratory or field is dependent on the existing scientific knowledge base which, in turn, becomes valuable when the new research is incorporated into the scientific knowledge base.

Scientific literature composing the scientific knowledge base is often divided into two basic categories:

• Primary literature -- publications that report the results of  original  scientific research. These include journal papers, conference papers, monographic series, technical reports, theses, and dissertations.
• Secondary literature -- publications that synthesize and condense what is known on specific topics. These include reviews, monographs, textbooks, treatises, handbooks, and manuals. These take time to produce and usually cite key "primary" publications on the topic.

Scientific Research/Publication Cycle

The following chart illustrates common steps involved in the scientific research process (inner circle), the dissemination of research results through the primary and secondary literature (outer circle), and the personal assimilation of this information resulting in new ideas and research (inner circle):

Scientific Journals, Magazines and Series

Scientific serials can be grouped into the following three categories.  Journals - Scholarly or Popular?  summarizes the differences between different types of journals and popular magazines.

Journal papers are the basic "molecular" unit of scientific knowledge base and are the most important "primary" source in the sciences. More than  80%  of the scientific research literature is published in this format. Annually 1.5 million articles are published in over 25,000 peer reviewed journals. Cumulatively there have been more than 50 million peer reviewed papers published since the first scientific journal was published in  1665 .

• Magazines and Newsletters  -- Articles appearing in these publications tend to be popular in format and scope. They may contain news and perspectives of professional societies and environmental organizations, report on research published in scholarly journals, report on environmental problems and new political initiatives, or contain articles aimed at the layperson.
• They are published by government agencies, universities or professional organizations. See  Natural Resources Agency Government Documents and Reports  for additional information.
• The  series has a distinctive name. Typical names include  Bulletin ,  Special Report ,  Special Paper , Technical Report , and  Technical Paper .
• Individual issues are consecutively numbered, e.g. Technical Paper No. 36.
• Each issue has a distinctive author and title.
• There is no regular publication schedule.

A typical example is:

Wheeler, W.E., R.C. Gatti, & G.A. Bartlett.(a) 1984.  Duck Breeding, Ecology and Harvest Characteristics on Grand River Marsh Wildlife Area .(b) Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources(c) Technical Bulletin(d) No. 145(e). where a=individual author; b=individual title; c=series author; d=series title; e=series number

To Find Individual Papers:  Use databases listed in  Articles and Databases  to find individual papers published in scientific journals, magazines and series. Databases typically can be searched by subject, taxonomic category, habitat, time period, chemical substance, geographic area or author. In addition the websites of many journal and magazine publishers contain searchable databases of articles published in their publications.

To Find Print and Fulltext Availability:  See the  Journal and Newspaper Finder  for specific holdings and available formats of journal, magazine and series titles available through the HSU Library. Enter the title of the publication, not the article title. In addition some series are cataloged by individual author and title in the  HSU Library Catalog . In addition directories listed in  Fulltext Journal Directories  include some fulltext journals that are not in our  Journal and Newspaper Finder .

To Find Abbrevations of Scientific Publications:  Many scientific journal and series titles are abbreviated in the literature.  Journal Title Abbreviations  lists both general abbreviation sources and more specific discipline sources in the sciences.

To Find Important Journals by Subject:  See  Journal-Ranking.com ,  Journals Ranked by Impact  (Sci-Bytes), SCImago Journal & Country Rank  and  Eigenfactor.org - Ranking and Mapping Scientific Knowledge .

Conference Papers

Papers presented at national and international conferences, symposia, and workshops are another source of "primary" scientific information . For many conferences the presented papers are eventually published in a "proceedings" or "transactions" volume. Papers with no published proceedings may be refined and reworked for formal publication in a journal. Proceedings available in the HSU Library are listed in the  HSU Library Catalog under both author (generally the name of the conference, individual editor or sponsoring organization) and title.

Many discipline databases included in  Articles and Databases  index individual conference papers by subject, taxonomic, geographic, and author. The  Conference Papers Index  and  PapersFirst  databases only index conference papers.

Theses and Dissertations

The outcome of graduate study conducted at universities is commonly a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation. In addition to the formal thesis or dissertation, research results are often communicated in other "primary" literature formats, such as the journal paper.

See  Theses and Dissertations  for how to find and acquire 1) HSU masters theses; and 2) theses and dissertations produced at other universities that are available in other libraries and on the Internet.

Scientific Monographs

Scientific monographs are book length works written by specialists for the benefit of other specialists. As defined by the  National Research Council  they attempt to "...collect, collate, analyze, integrate, and synthesize all relevant contributions to the archival literature of the scientific and engineering journals and to add original material as required". They are different from textbooks which are pedagogical works and scientific popularizations for the general public.

Monographs are listed in the  HSU Library Catalog  and in  other library catalogs .

Government Documents and Technical Reports

Scientists at federal and state government agencies conduct research that is sometimes published officially  by the government as a  government document . Other research is published in the "open" scientific literature as journal articles and other publications.

The HSU Library is an official " depository library " for federal and state govenment documents and annually receives approximately 6,000 government documents in either paper or microfiche format. In addition 80% of all recently published federal publications are available on the Internet.

Research projects conducted  for  government agencies are frequently published as  technical reports . They are usually produced in response to a specific information need with research either 1) conducted "in-house" by state or federal research labs, or 2) contracted out to universities, consulting firms, research institutes, or private industry.

Progress and final reports typically are used directly by the sponsoring agency with limited distribution beyond the organization. As a result technical report literature is sometimes called "gray literature" because of its difficulty to identify and acquire.

The format of technical reports is more flexible in organization and tends to contain more of the scientific data collected. Research first reported in a technical report may be reworked and published in other "primary" literature formats.

The  Natural Resources Agency Government Documents and Technical Reports  research guide contains further information on govenment documents and technical reports issued by federal and California State agencies, including their organization in the HSU Library and indexes to their content. The focus is on agencies responsible for managing and conducting research in natural resources.

Scientific Data

Scientific data are numerical quantities or other factual attributes derived from observation, experimentation or calculation. They are the raw material and the building block for scientific research. Through data analysis and interpretation new scientific information is generated.

The archiving of data collected and used in scientific research is important for future replication, repurposing based on new ideas or exploration of new analysis methodologies. Many funding agenices and scientific journals require authors of scientific papers to archive and share data utilized in their studies.

Data repositories archive and make data available to the scientific community. They may contain 1) data that has been collected as part of massive mission-oriented projects, e.g., atmospheric, hydrological, or oceanographic, or genomic; or 2) original data or data extracted from larger datasets that are associated with specifc published research studies.

Following are major directories of data repositories:

• Data.gov  (United States Government) Browse or search for datasets available from US government executive agencies.
• Data Files  (Association of College and Research Libraries. Science and Technology Section) Lists federal, state and foreign goverment data repository directories.
• DataCite  (British Library, BioMed Central and Digital Curation Centre) Arranged alphabetically.
• Global Change Master Directory  (Goddard Space Flight Center) Browse by broad subject area or search by keyword.
• Open Access Directory: Data Repositories  (Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College) Arranged by broad subject.
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What is the scientific literature used for?

For better or for worse, we paleontologists (and many other scientists) view the use and importance of the literature in terms of citations. Citations are what drives the ever-beloved impact factor, as well as other metrics such as the  h -index. Indeed, this focus on citations colors many discussions on access to the literature, such as the relative importance of rapid electronic access. You’ll hear lots of statements along these lines: “If you are in the business of writing a manuscript, but don’t have access to a particular piece of literature, you can always use interlibrary loan or a similar service. Or just got to the university library next door. Patience is a virtue. It won’t kill you (or science) to wait a few extra days.”

Although I don’t completely discount this idea (indeed, we all have seen our share of PDF requests that could have been fulfilled with a few extra seconds of Googling), I think it reflects a rather anemic view of how the scientific literature is used by scientists. Citations are certainly an easily trackable mode of literature use, but (as noted time and time again by advocates of “alternative metrics”) the literature is used for more than just writing papers. Particularly in a field like paleontology, which has a strong record of public interest and public engagement, these non-citeable uses can be myriad.

So, I decided to put together a quick list of the different ways that I use the scientific literature on a day-to-day basis. In particular, I’ve noted some areas where timely (i.e., near-immediate) access is highly desirable.

How do I use the literature?

• Background research for teaching.  I teach a one month introduction to paleontology / evolution in the fossil record course for high school freshmen, and this is a topic for which there isn’t a good textbook for all of the content we cover (although Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish does an excellent job with talking about homology, development, and the fossil record). And even if there was a comprehensive textbook, I still want to sprinkle my lectures with examples from the literature, images from papers, and the like, as well as bring in relevant material from recent publications. Thus, I not infrequently turn to the primary literature.
• Background research for a media interview.  Every once in awhile, I’m contacted by a member of the news media to provide an opinion on a piece of new research. Although I do not generally accept interview requests for topics outside my area of expertise, even for topics within my area of expertise I sometimes want to brush up on a particular fact or research some of the context behind a particular story. For instance, I’m quite comfortable talking about horned dinosaurs–but if it’s a horned dinosaur from a place I don’t know much about, I might head to the literature to brush up on the overall context. This may or may not come up in the interview, but I want to be prepared to represent the science as accurately and completely as possible. Time is of the essence here!
• Research for public talk.  When developing a talk for a public audience (I give between 5 and 10 annually, for museums, community groups, and other events), I sometimes need to delve into a new topic. Maybe it’s to see what else has been found in a particular formation (it’s always nice to throw in “local color”), or just to understand a particular point on a related topic.
• Reviewing manuscripts.  Although I only accept review requests for manuscripts within my area of expertise, I frequently refer back to the literature to double-check claims made by the authors, suggest additional references, and refresh my memory on relevant details of anatomy, statistics, or geology. Review turnarounds are usually between 10 and 30 days, and it is not uncommon to be polishing a review a few days (or hours) before it is due. Waiting two weeks for an ILL isn’t a good use of time, or fair to the authors and editors who expect timely reviews. I’m certainly not going to drop $40 for a PDF in this case, either (particularly because publishers don’t reimburse for these kinds of expenses).
• Reviewing grant applications.  The same logic as for reviewing manuscripts applies to reviewing grants.
• Writing manuscripts.  I’ve buried this one in the middle of the list to emphasize that it is only one of many uses. There are few things more frustrating than being in the final push to finish a manuscript, and finding out there is a seemingly critical paper tantalizingly out of reach behind a paywall.
• Identifying specimens in a museum collection. In the process of curating a museum collection, I am called upon to ensure that all of our cataloged specimens are identified as precisely and accurately as possible. In some cases, past experience guides me and others who work in the collections. However, parts of our collections (particularly historically collected ones) are somewhat outside my expertise (e.g., oreodonts and trilobites). Off to the literature! A well-illustrated paper can be invaluable for pinning down an identification. (how well some papers achieve this, though, is the topic of another post )
• Providing information on a topic to a colleague or member of the public. At our museum, we’ll sometimes have folks drop by for a fossil identification, or we might get a question about a particular paleontological topic. If it’s something that’s outside the realm of popular books (and let’s face it, if it’s not a dinosaur, it’s probably not in a book), off to the literature!
• Writing museum exhibit text.  I am fortunate to have the opportunity to assemble temporary exhibits for my museum sometimes, focusing on fossils from our collection that tell a story about Earth’s history and our connection to it. But, I am not necessarily an expert on every fossil that I think is exhibit-worthy. So, off to the literature I go! Temporary exhibits here are frequently the result of reading or skimming at least a few papers on the topic.
• Reference for artistic project. Every once in awhile, I’m lucky enough to work with an artist to illustrate a new discovery made by my museum and colleagues, or I am contacted by an artist who wants an opinion on a particular piece of work. My extensive photo library comes in handy, but I also rely extensively on the literature. If there’s a question about the plants found in a particular environment, or the scale pattern on the skin in a particular group, or the types of non-dinosaurs that lived at a relevant time in history, I’ll often turn to previously published work.

I’m sure I’ve probably missed something–how do you use the literature? Sound off in the comments section!

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How to read and learn from scientific literature, even if you’re not an expert

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Brenda Wingfield receives funding from NRF and DST. She works for the University of Pretoria and her research is done in FABI. She is vice president of ASSAf and holds a research chair in Fungal Genomics.

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Reading scientific literature is not for the faint-hearted. It’s dense, and very often full of foreign terms and ideas.

It also assumes a basic understanding of the discipline in question. I can’t imagine that many people outside the world of theoretical physics are reading journal articles on the subject. That makes sense: research has found that scientific literature across disciplines is getting more complicated .

But as more and more journals embrace the principles of open access , and more information becomes freely available online, curious readers are probably more likely to start engaging with scientific literature. That’s a good thing. Research shouldn’t be regarded as a closely kept secret for a small number of people. In a world full of half truths, simplistic and misleading summaries, and outright “fake news”, being able to read and engage with scientific literature can be a powerful weapon.

Of course, you can also seek out examples of scientists writing for the public. But be wary: not all scientists are willing to do this; we are, on the whole, very picky about details and don’t like generalisations. So try to engage with scientific literature where you can: it will be hard work in the beginning if you have no scientific background, but it’s a skill that can be developed.

So, if you’d like to start reading more scientific literature, here are a few tips to improve your experience. I’m focusing largely on the life sciences since that’s my area of expertise.

Making sense of articles

Science is about asking and answering questions. Scientific articles are the way in which scientists communicate their results to their peers. Here’s how to navigate those articles.

Choose journals that publish good science:

“Good science” is rigorous, verifiable and rooted in a broader body of research. There are however, an increasing number of scientific journals available. Some have better credentials than others; often, these are linked to reputable scientific societies. For instance, the South African Journal of Botany is the journal of the South African Association of Botanists.

Only people with a four-year degree who are active in the field can be members of the society. The same sort of rigour is applied to who can publish in the journal.

When journals aren’t linked to societies, you can look at their editors’ credentials. Reputable scientists are unlikely to allow their names to be linked to fraudulent or predatory (those that charge a fee to publish articles, without any review or editing) journals.

These are not reputable, and do not publish robust, good science.

Also, don’t be fooled by people’s titles. I would hope that no one would consult me about heart surgery but I sometimes see adverts where a “doctor” has endorsed a product – often one that has nothing to do with their field of expertise.

Start with the abstract for a broad overview:

It’s expensive to subscribe to most journals or to buy entire articles online. But even limited access journals usually supply the abstract for free. This summarises the article and usually gives the major findings. You can then decide whether you want more details and are prepared to buy the article, if it’s not open access, or to keep reading if it is.

And then continue in a chronological fashion:

Most articles have an introduction which introduces the topic and sets the scene. It usually includes a statement as to the aim of the study – essentially, the question that the authors set out to answer. It also provides references to previous literature, which could be useful to understanding the topic. There will references throughout the article; this is a way of ensuring that all statements are substantiated with reference to the published literature.

The next section of an article is usually followed by the materials and methods (although in some journals this might be relegated to the end of the article). Here, the authors will provide details about the methodology used in their experiments. This is where things can get very technical, but you will also see constant reference to other research that has been published using the same or similar methods if you want to get a better understanding of the methods.

Then comes the results section, which outlines the results yielded by the experiments. This, too, is likely to be very technical but is also where the details are provided.

The last section is the discussion, which provides the authors’ interpretation of the results. This is often what scientists read most carefully, since it’s where the authors “connect the dots”; they are also likely to provide a conclusion and suggest an answer to the question they were trying to answer.

Read widely

Once you’re finished reading one article on a topic, read some more. You should not ever just believe what is stated in a single article. Science is very repetitive and builds on the research that has come before, so researchers are often repeating others’ experiments. This is where the in text references come in handy. They provide a way for results from one laboratory to be checked and tested by others. So, to get the truth about a topic, read a number of articles about it.

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Literature and science.

• Michael H. Whitworth Michael H. Whitworth Faculty of English Language and Literature, Merton College Oxford
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.990
• Published online: 28 September 2020

Though “literature and science” has denoted many distinct cultural debates and critical practices, the historicist investigation of literary-scientific relations is of particular interest because of its ambivalence toward theorization. Some accounts have suggested that the work of Bruno Latour supplies a necessary theoretical framework. An examination of the history of critical practice demonstrates that many concepts presently attributed to or associated with Latour have been longer established in the field. Early critical work, exemplified by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, tended to focus one-sidedly on the impact of science on literature. Later work, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, and on Mary Hesse’s and Max Black’s work on metaphor and analogy in science, identified the scope for a cultural influence on science. It was further bolstered by the “strong program” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially the work of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. It found ways of reading scientific texts for the traces of the cultural, and literary texts for traces of science; the method is implicitly modeled on psychoanalysis. Bruno Latour’s accounts of literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation have precedents in the critical practices of critics in the field of literature and science from the 1980s onward.

• Gillian Beer
• historicism
• inscription
• Bruno Latour
• literature and science
• science studies

The historicist study of the relations of literature and science is a critical practice that draws eclectically on a range of linguistic, literary, and cultural theory, and which has also been significantly informed by concepts and practices in the fields of history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. These bodies of theory have crucially enabled it to overcome deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about the relative statuses of literary and scientific forms of knowledge, but its focus on historical frameworks and contingencies means that practitioners have not always fully articulated their working premises, preferring in many cases to build on the practices of their predecessors. As a field, it has been open to theory but ambivalent about theorization. Moreover, it exhibits significant internal divisions regarding methodology. In part these correspond to the periods under study, but there are also significant methodological divergences associated with North America and the United Kingdom. Although there is significant interaction between Anglophone critics as well as many exceptions to the rule, North American practice as exemplified by Configurations , the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, takes a greater interest in contemporary culture, including developments such as posthumanism, visual cultures, digital humanities, programming languages, and video games; it is less interested than its British counterpart in historical literature and culture, as well as in the ways that the incorporation of science into a specifically literary discourse may transform it or call into question its authority. Since the early 21st century , the North American school has used the work of Bruno Latour to crystallize its methodological presuppositions. It is the contention of this article that although such theorization may bring methodological clarity and maintain an alignment between the field and the field of science studies, it does so at the cost of neglecting a wide range of ideas, methods, and practices that have proved fruitful in the past. However, by considering Latour and other theorists one may brings to the surface hidden theoretical assumptions in seemingly untheorized work. The present article considers a range of critical works, from 1980 to the present, but gives particular prominence to Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots ( 1983 ) because Beer’s practices have been widely influential.

The phrase “literature and science” signifies many things, not all of which are considered here. One is the use of quasi-scientific methodology in literary criticism, drawing on contemporary science and particularly on the fields of neurology, evolutionary theory, and evolutionary psychology. The possibility of literary criticism building on a supposedly scientific foundation has a long history—there are examples in the Victorian era and in the early 20th century , notably I. A. Richards. 1 Some of the authority of psychoanalytical and structuralist literary criticisms came from the scientific status of the specialist bodies of theory on which they drew. In that regard, critics such as Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll are part of a longer tradition. 2 Critics of them have drawn attention to the reductiveness of the method, its dependence on a selective reading of the science it draws on, and to its uncritical trust in its authority, though as Alan Richardson has noted, critics sometimes conflate distinct practices such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive criticism. 3

The phrase “literature and science” also signifies a longer tradition of debate about the value of “culture” and its relation to scientific ideals of knowledge. If its rhetorical touchstones lie in the early 19th century —William Wordsworth’s line “We murder to dissect” from the poem “The Tables Turned” and John Keats’s phrase “Unweave a rainbow” from the poem “Lamia”—its canonical prose articulation came into being in the late 19th century in the debate between Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley. 4 It continues through the 20th century in a range of lectures and essays, reaching its most familiar form in C. P. Snow’s lecture and book The Two Cultures ( 1959 ). 5 Generally speaking, “literature,” “science,” “poetry,” and related terms are spoken of as ahistorical abstractions; history, if it figures at all, is present only in the form of a narrative of decline of one side or the other. Very often the debate is a coded displacement of another topic—religion for Arnold and Huxley, and social class for Snow. Methodologically, the tradition of debate has little to offer the historicist study of the two fields, but its texts are relevant insofar as they articulate a range of deeply ingrained beliefs about both and thereby represent a horizon of expectations in relation to which practitioners of historicist study need to articulate their work.

Though literature and science as quasi-scientific method and as cultural debate can be excluded on principle, there are other definitions that are not fully represented here for reasons of space. First, the field of literature and medicine has long overlapped in significant ways with literature and science, but also has distinct practices that cannot be covered here. Second, the place of technology in the field is even more vexed and unresolved, but the present article does not attempt to give a full account.

Early Practices, 1926–1978

The origins of the field can be traced to Carl Grabo’s A Newton Among Chemists ( 1930 ), a study of the place of science in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and several works by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, including The Microscope and English Imagination ( 1935 ) and Newton Demands the Muse ( 1946 ). Behind both lay works of cultural history such as A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World ( 1926 ), which gave Grabo his title and which was also a point of reference for Nicolson, and the tradition of “the history of ideas,” as exemplified by Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being ( 1936 ). The terminology of Whitehead and the early literary critics has the flavor of its era, but certain conceptual tensions have persisted. On the one hand, the early critics often speak of systems of thought at a supra-individual level: an era’s “mentality” or “imagination” (as in “the 18th-century imagination”); such a conceptualization unites literature and science in a common field. On the other hand, critics found it necessary to speak in terms of the “impact” of science on literature, a relation that implicitly separates the two areas and that does so even when writers are granted the agency to “borrow” from science and to transform what they find. The primary questions of such early critics concerned how the concepts, images, aims, and technologies of a given science had significantly informed the literary texts of its era.

In 1978 , Nicolson’s former student, George Rousseau, wrote an account of the “state of the field,” which has also been read as an “obituary” for its early form, and which has become deeply embedded in the field’s self-conception. 6 Rousseau’s essay has become, at least symbolically, the point at which earlier critical practices and critical vocabularies were rejected. Rousseau divided the field between “philologists” and what he idiosyncratically called “theorists”: by theorists he meant historians of ideas who were aware of the historical changeability of definitions and who thus were reluctant to provide the monological glosses characteristic of the philological annotator; theorists were critics who advanced hypotheses about the evolution of an idea and who defended those hypotheses against alternative positions. 7 In saying this, Rousseau implied that the groundwork of philology was necessary but not sufficient, but he enabled an overreaction in which it was seen as unnecessary and antiquated.

From the late 1970s onward, practitioners in the field were concerned to move beyond the asymmetrical relation that dominated earlier work in which scientific influence dominated the literary and the cultural. Such a relation seemingly reproduces the dominance of science in contemporary European and North American society and so confirms the status of literature and the arts as being at best decorative. Practitioners were also concerned to elevate their work beyond the merely philological. In 1978 , there were already models for a future practice. Rousseau himself notes “The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form” ( 1968 ) by A. Dwight Culler, where the notion of literary form lifts the perspective above that of the merely local annotation. George Levine has praised Stanley Hyman’s The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers ( 1962 ) as a study that was willing to engage in the literary analysis of scientific texts rather than treating them as transparent sources for ideas. Jacques Barzun’s Darwin, Marx, and Wagner ( 1958 ) and Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos ( 1965 ) have also been noted as significant antecedents. 8

The field’s engagement with literary theory and with history and philosophy of science arises from the problem of how to bring science within conceptual reach of the concepts and practices of literary criticism without dissolving it as a distinct object of attention. Here, as elsewhere in this article, “science” usually means in practice a particular science in the form it took in a particular era. However, in moving beyond the asymmetry of Nicolson’s practice, the method nevertheless needs to respect the real asymmetries of a given historical moment.

The Conceptual Resources of History and Philosophy of Science

The positions within the history and philosophy of science that have been most enthusiastically absorbed within the field emphasize the changing nature of scientific theory and practice, the importance of creativity in scientific endeavor, and the role of nonscientific materials within that creativity. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( 1962 ) was a key reference point for many critics from the late 1970s onward. It created a new agenda for the philosophy of science, which. since 1945 , had been focused largely on ahistorical questions under the influence of Karl Popper. 9 Kuhn foregrounded moments of major theory change in science. While what he called “normal science” may work in an accumulative way within a “paradigm,” making small adjustments to its theoretical outlook, over the course of time scientists would become aware of anomalies in nature that did not fit the paradigm, and which could not be accounted for through minor adjustments. Such anomalies require a major overhaul of scientific theory—the “paradigm shift.” The scientist must learn “to see nature in a different way.” 10 Kuhn’s focus on moments of change was important, as was the implication that at such moments scientific theorization was open to nonscientific influences. So too was his endorsement of the belief that conceptual structures create “ways of seeing” that may enable discovery or, indeed, obstruct it. 11

Also influential in this regard was the idea of tacit knowledge developed by the philosopher Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge ( 1958 ). In the summary of critic N. Katherine Hayles, “tacit knowledge” is “in some sense known,” but “cannot be formulated explicitly.” It guides the scientist “to the interesting fact, the one datum or experiment out of thousands that will prove useful.” 12 It is learned “by doing science” rather than by learning the formalized rules of science. 13 The idea of tacit knowledge suggests that although much of science is carried out in a rational and logical way that conforms to the public image of the discipline, it is bounded by assumptions that are subscribed to without rational justification. It is at this boundary that cultural elements can enter into science.

Another significant source lay in philosophical and linguistic thinking about metaphor and analogy, and particularly the work of Max Black and Mary Hesse. In this regard, literary critics were required to break from a deeply embedded cultural distinction between the literal and the metaphorical in which the metaphorical utterance is viewed as a decorative supplement to a literal core of meaning. In this view, while the metaphorical formulation of an opinion or feeling may be rhetorically more persuasive, it is ultimately reducible to the literal. In such a view, in Black’s later summary, metaphors are “expendable if one disregards the incidental pleasures of stating figuratively what might just as well have been said literally.” 14 In opposition to this view, Black and others advanced a cognitive view of metaphors: humans, including scientists, think through metaphors, and although metaphors can inhibit understanding, they can also assist in the modeling of reality. Once the idea of cognitive metaphor has been accepted, the distinction between metaphor and analogy becomes relatively slight, and the terms are often used as near synonyms. Griffiths, however, notes that metaphor often implies that one conceptual domain is stable and provides a model for the comprehension of another that is inchoate, while analogy—at least in some forms—allows for thinking in which both domains are reconceptualized in relation to each other. 15

Mary Hesse’s Models and Analogies in Science ( 1963 , revised and expanded 1966 ) took as its starting point the early 20th-century debate about scientific theorization between the French physicist Pierre Duhem and his British counterpart, Norman Campbell. Duhem had contrasted national styles of theory-making, favoring the “abstract and systematic” French style, and had deplored the British taste for mechanical models. Campbell had defended models and analogies—though not necessarily the mechanical model—as being not merely a sort of scaffolding that was removed when the theories were constructed, but instead an “utterly essential part” of them. 16 Moreover, while theories in Duhem’s sense risked being “static museum piece[s],” models were dynamic and open to development. 17 While it would be simplistic to equate paradigm shifts with changes of models and of metaphors, it is clear that metaphors and analogies serve “to anchor paradigms.” 18 As Kuhn wrote in 1979 , “Theory change [. . .] is accompanied by a change in some of the relevant metaphors and in the corresponding parts of a network of similarities through which terms attach to nature.” 19

Kuhn notes that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions says very little about the role of “technological advance” or of “external social, economic, and intellectual conditions in the development of the sciences”: it is, like Hesse’s Models and Analogies , an internalist account of science. 20 Nevertheless, both works enabled the approach that historicist literature and science sought, in which nonscientific external elements play a role in science in the making. The “irrationality” of the external elements is of lesser importance than their being culturally embedded.

It is perhaps surprising to find that Michel Foucault played only an ancillary role in the theorization of literature and science. The Foucault of The Order of Things ( 1966 , translated into English in 1970 ) and The Archaeology of Knowledge ( 1969 , translated into English in 1972 ) is mentioned in passing, and often in endnotes, as, for example, “a necessary precondition” for work in the field. 21 In Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields ( 1976 ), a work of science studies that has been influential on literature and science, Donna Haraway identifies The Order of Things as being of “exceptional importance for understanding the structure of thought in apparently diverse but contemporary fields,” and Foucault’s ability to recognize analogies across fields introduced an investigatory process that was absent from Kuhn or Hesse. 22 That many critics in the 1980s relegated their discussions of Foucault to endnotes while engaging with historians of science more prominently in the main text suggests they wished to align their work with Anglophone traditions in the history of science. And although there are many similarities between the field in the 1980s and the critical practices of New Historicism in the same era, the sidelining of Foucault suggests that the aspects of his work most prominent in the 1980s—the social sciences rather than the natural sciences, the asylum and the prison, and a focus on subjectivity and state power—were imperfectly aligned with the concerns of literature and science. 23

Reading Science

Nicolson’s practice was to treat scientific works as transparent media, using them as windows onto ideas rather than as texts to be interpreted. From the late 1970s onward, practitioners in the field endeavored to maintain symmetry between the treatment of literature and of science by turning their attention to scientific texts. Such a practice was particularly fertile in relation to texts from the 19th century . As Beer explains, scientists in the 19th century “shared a literary, non-mathematical discourse which was readily available to readers without a scientific training. . . . Moreover, scientists themselves in their texts drew openly upon literary, historical and philosophical material as part of their arguments.” 24 The privileging of the written products of science is not without its problems: it leaves unresolved whether (and how) literary critics can read the material artifacts and nonlinguistic inscriptions of science. Moreover, it raises the question of whether science writing for nonspecialist audiences (“popular science writing”) provides an adequate substitute for technical and particularly mathematical works, and, if it does, under what circumstances and with what provisos. Although material artifacts and the nonlinguistic have grown in importance, the practice of reading scientific texts remains central to the field.

As Stuart Peterfreund summarized in 1987 , “one begins by ‘reading’ science for the same concomitants of figurative effect that one has heretofore read literature for.” 25 Alongside that practice, however, one may read a scientific work for its explicit or implicit narrative and for a more impressionistic sense of its tone or atmosphere: Beer, in analyzing The Origin of Species alongside Darwin’s literary reading, foregrounds narratives of succession and restoration and notes how the theme of profusion is manifested in list-like sentences brimming with the names of species. 26 The impression of a natural world that is simultaneously teeming with new growth and threatened with a struggle for resources is interwoven by Beer with canonical literary texts, and also works of 19th-century political economy, most prominently those of Thomas Malthus.

At times the social and literary traces in scientific texts are prominent and easily spotted, at least by the critic who has been primed to look for them, but at other times they are subtler and require more sensitive and indeed tentative reconstruction. The same applies to the traces of science in literary texts: to move beyond texts that literally depict science or scientists necessitates a more subtle and historically informed attention. At times critics have drawn implicitly on a psychoanalytical model in which the scientific text is not fully conscious of its cultural debts and the literary text is not fully conscious of what it owes to science, and in which both require the delicate questioning of the analyst to bring the repressed material to light. Beer’s words on The Origin of Species are revealing in this regard: Darwin’s text “deliberately extends itself towards the boundaries of the literally unthinkable ” and Darwin never “raised into consciousness its imaginative and sociological implications.” 27 She goes on to say there is “ latent meaning ” present in The Origin , manifested in its moments of conceptual obscurity and in metaphors “whose peripheries remain undescribed.” 28 Later she writes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a novel “enriched by a sense of multiple latent relations which are permitted to remain latent.” 29 The references to the unthinkable, to elements that cannot be raised into consciousness, and to the latent content of the text suggest, without ever explicitly specifying, the presence of Freudian psychoanalysis and of Freud’s distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream. Beer mentions Freud in Darwin’s Plots , but as a late 19th-century and early 20th-century thinker, not as a guide to methodology. While it is possible that Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious ( 1979 ) was influential in this regard, the only work by Jameson that Beer cites in Darwin’s Plots is Marxism and Form ( 1971 ); the resource on which Beer was most probably drawing was Pierre Macherey’s Pour une théorie de la production littéraire ( 1966 , translated as A Theory of Literary Production [ 1978 ]). Macherey provides the idea of the literary work having an “unconscious” which is not equivalent to the authorial unconscious. 30

The analogy between Beer’s mode of interpretation and Freud’s is not exact: if scientists and recognizable scientific terminology can appear conspicuously in a literary text, the censorship is malfunctioning. The latent content of the dream is sometimes fully manifest in a way that Freud’s unthinkable acts should not be. As Beer cautions early in her study, one need not “infer that Darwin is offering a single covert sub-text”: “Nor indeed should we take it for granted that there is an over and under text, or even a main plot and a sub-plot. The manifest and the latent are not fixed levels of text; they shift and change places according to who is reading and when.” 31 But even though the topography of “under” and “over” is complex in this version of psychoanalysis, the debts are plain, as are the benefits. Such a model removes the inhibiting effect of charges of misreading in which correctness is determined by a literary scholar’s idea of the correct scientific meaning of a text. It allows for literary writers’ mistakes to be recuperated as “creative misprision,” and deflects the objection that literary critics have conflated Newton with a derivative “Newtonianism,” or Darwinism with “Darwinisticism.” 32 The psychoanalytic model is not explicit: to reconstruct the theoretical affiliations of historicist practices in literature and science, one needs to read critical texts much as practitioners themselves read their scientific and literary texts, piecing together shards of discourse to conjecture the full structure.

Underlying this model of reading are particular theories and conceptions of language that go beyond the insistence that language is inescapably metaphorical. In Beer’s Darwin’s Plots , Jacques Derrida is most often invoked for his skepticism about the stabilizing effects of an origin within a structure, but he is also implicitly present in Beer’s characterization of Darwin’s language, and metaphorical language more generally, as vital and flexible: “[f]or his theory to work,” writes Beer, “Darwin needs the sense of free play, of ‘jeu’ as much, or even more, than he needs history.” 33 Throughout the study, Beer deploys a rich figurative vocabulary to characterize language and metaphor: words dilate, contract, and oscillate; some kinds of metaphors “thrive,” they stretch, they expand, and they are hard to control; over a long quotation, Darwin’s metaphor of the tree is seen to “grow, develop, change, extend, and finally complete itself”; metaphor in general is “polymorphic,” with the implication of being polymorphically perverse; “its energy needs the barriers which it seeks to break down.” 34 There is a theory of language implicit within these metaphors. Beer’s own figurative language surreptitiously energizes the concepts that she more formally states in the language of theory. Beer’s emphasis on vitality and instability is also a polemic against the culturally engrained figuration of scientific language as sharp, hard, and inflexible, a view that for literary criticism was codified in the New Critics’ contrast of the direct and denotative language of science with the indirect and conative language of poetry. 35 Although Beer also notes moments when Darwin’s writing stabilizes meaning, as a writer she invests less in her accounts of them.

A decade or so later, Susan Squier drew on the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s idea of the “domaining effect”: an idea or metaphor that means one thing in one domain will subtly shift its meaning when transplanted. Habits of thought “are always found in environments or contexts that have their own properties or characteristics.” Ideas “are always enunciated in an environment of other ideas, in contexts always occupied by other thoughts or images.” 36 The domaining effect presupposes linguistic flexibility, but also accounts for the newfound stability that a concept may acquire when transplanted into a new domain. One may helpfully combine Strathern’s account of domaining with Richard Rorty’s account of how a pragmatist philosopher would explain the apparent “hardness” of scientific facts: when an experimental test confirms or disproves a hypothesis, “[t]he hardness of fact [. . .] is simply the hardness of the previous agreements within a community about the consequences of a certain event.” 37 In Strathern’s terms, some domains will create semantic rigidity while others will allow for flexibility. It is clear from Rorty’s account that the semantic effects are due not to an intrinsic property of the domain, but to social agreements surrounding its employment in specific professional environments.

The Social Dimension

While a synthesis of the work of Hesse, Black, Kuhn, and Foucault provided the primary guidelines for literature and science study in the decade following 1978 , the direction the synthesis took was guided by newer work in the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in which the prominent theorists were David Bloor, Barry Barnes, and Harry Collins. Until around 1970 , the sociology of knowledge had accepted the Popperian division between the proper domain of philosophy of science, a focus on the validation of scientific results, and of sociology, a focus on the origins of scientific ideas. 38 Moreover, it had taken an asymmetrical approach to truth and error, recognizing social and ideological factors only as the causes of error in science. Under the influence of Kuhn, sociologists recognized that there was a social element in the validation of results. The so-called strong program in the sociology of knowledge emerged around 1973 and went further, seeing all aspects of science as being open to cultural and ideological influences. 39 The four main principles of the strong program were concisely outlined by David Bloor. First, the sociology of knowledge had to locate “causes of belief.” Second, “no exception must be made for those beliefs held by the investigator who pursues the programme”; in investigating beliefs, the strong program was to be “impartial with respect to truth and falsity.” Third, it had to “explain its own emergence and conclusions: it must be reflexive.” Fourth, and most distinctively, “Not only must true and false beliefs be explained, but the same sort of causes must generate both classes of belief. This may be called the symmetry requirement.” 40

Bloor’s demand for symmetry has much in common with the symmetry that studies in literature and science sought to achieve as they moved away from the practices of Nicolson’s generation of scholars. Although in the field of literature and science the demand for symmetry was primarily motivated by a need to defend literary writers as active thinkers, not the passive recipients of science, and to defend literature as a form of knowledge in its own right, there is a strong similarity. Insofar as literature, from the point of view of science, may seem to entertain unscientific ways of thinking or even fundamentally consist of them, it stands for the “false beliefs” that are contrasted with science; and insofar as science, from the point of view of literature, may seem to present a reductive or limited view of the world, the positions are reversed.

The consequences of the demands for impartiality and symmetry are many and extend beyond the binary of science and literature. Opening up false beliefs for investigation allows for a consideration of sciences that appeared to become dead ends in the history of science but that were significant in their own moment; and it allows for a consideration of disciplines that were never fully accepted as science, even though in some cases they organized themselves in conventionally institutionalized ways, and for a consideration of the boundary work that excluded them. It allows for the consideration of, for example, neo-Lamarckism in early 20th-century biology, the persistence of the “ether” as an epistemic object in physics, psychical research, and the persistence of the idea of alchemy in early 20th-century physics. The strong program was also attractive to critics working on more canonical scientific ideas: both Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists cite Barry Barnes’s Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory ( 1974 ). 41

By opening science to “external” influences, SSK allowed space for the research program that Rousseau had tentatively suggested in 1978 : a search for the ways in which “imaginative literature shapes science.” 42 The consequent difficulty was that of modeling the ways that literature and science could be simultaneously interconnected and yet distinct. From the late 1960s onward, historian Robert M. Young had hypothesized a “common intellectual context” for literature, science, theology, and other disciplines. The notion of a “common context” or “one culture” was vital in one phase of growth but, as Alice Jenkins has suggested, it is possible that the one culture was never a “historical reality” but an “imagined utopia.” 43 Although some critics have dismissed Beer and Levine for adhering to a simplistic one culture model, their own methodological reflections and critical practices speak of something more complex. 44 The metaphor of traffic between distinct disciplines is more productive, allowing practitioners to conceive of one-way and two-way traffic, of temporary obstructions and diversions, and of unequal flows in each direction. 45 Nevertheless, because of the preference for symmetry, “bidirectional flow is almost always seen as more prestigious and more defensible than unidirectionality.” 46

Weighing the Importance of Latour

Since 2016 , several overviews of the field have given a central place to science studies and have equated science studies with the work of Bruno Latour. 47 The focus on science studies underplays the continuing significance of longer-established intellectual resources deriving from the history and philosophy of science; the equation of science studies with Latour neglects the influence of the longer tradition of science studies that began with the establishment of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh in 1964 , from which grew the strong program. In the field of literature and science, the most often-cited works by Latour begin with Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts ( 1979 ), coauthored with Steve Woolgar, an anthropological study of a biological research laboratory undertaken from 1975 to 1977 , written as if the personnel were an unfamiliar tribe whose belief systems were unknown to the anthropologist observer. In a 1986 reprint, the word “social” was removed from the subtitle. 48 Latour’s The Pasteurization of France (French 1984 ; translated into English in 1988 ) took as its focus a historical scientific revolution, that is, Louis Pasteur’s transformation of medicine and hygiene into a science; methodologically, it focused on the texts of three scientific journals and it expanded the range of “actors,” “agents,” and “actants” to be broader than the usual humanist ideal, to include nonhuman, collective, and figurative entities. 49 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society ( 1987 ) offered a more theoretical overview of method and crystallized a “performative” notion of scientific fact, according to which the factuality of a fact was secured by its being accepted and used by later scientists. Latour’s work was given great prominence in the first and second issues of Configurations , the journal of the predominantly North American organization called the Society for Literature and Science. 50 Although there have been dissenting voices in Configurations and elsewhere, these issues sent out a strong message about methodology. 51

The opening chapter of Laboratory Life presents scientists as “compulsive and almost manic writers,” as “a strange tribe who spend the greatest part of their day coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing.” 52 To the anthropologist persona of the opening chapter, the notion of “inscription” makes sense of what had at first been a confusing environment: “It seemed as if there might be an essential similarity between the inscription capabilities of apparatus, the manic passion for marking, coding, and filing, and the literary skills of writing, persuasion, and discussion”; the laboratory “began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription.” 53 The phrase about literary inscription has often been quoted in the context of literature and science studies, and to quote it in such contexts is to subtly alter its meaning through a domaining effect. Though Latour is interested in texts—necessarily so in The Pasteurization of France —and in treating material elements as if they were texts (seeing a copy of an English dictionary, Laboratory Life draws an analogy with racks of chemical samples that “might be called material dictionaries”), the respects in which his texts are literary is open to question. Published scientific papers certainly have their own tacit rules of form and style, as do informal scientific communications, but they are not those of literature in the sense of fiction, poetry, or drama. One can acknowledge the insufficiency of purely formalist attempts to define the literary while still being able to recognize the formal differences between scientific and literary inscription. Surprisingly, though, critics quoting the phrase from Laboratory Life do not usually note the problem with the term “literary.”

Setting aside the problematic term, it is clear why Latour’s interest in inscription makes his work significant in the field of literature and science but, at around the time that Laboratory Life was published, practitioners were assembling their own toolkit of concepts. It is true that the role of metaphor in theory formation, as highlighted by Black, Hesse, and others, is primarily cognitive and does not imply inscription, but any evidence-based historical study necessarily depends on written evidence of figurative language. Darwin’s Plots , as an exemplar of practice, makes use not only of the multiple editions of The Origin of Species that appeared in Darwin’s lifetime, but also of his letters and notebooks. As Devin Griffiths notes, “Darwin is the central figure of Literature and Science because his writing was his science.” 54 And to the extent that Latour’s interest in inscription also includes reading—in the opening vignettes of Laboratory Life , “Julius” comes in to the office “eating an apple and perusing a copy of Nature ”—it is clear that, by the mid-1980s, the field was systematically focused on investigating what scientists read and in analyzing it. 55 The practical work of tracking a scientist’s reading may seem philological in the pejorative sense, but it provides an essential foundation for the more imaginative parts of the analytical process. The innovation in Laboratory Life comes first in its recognition that inscription is present in contemporary science, and second, in its suggestion that the kinds of inscription generated by laboratory computers may be as worthy of the name as the writing in a scientist’s notebook or a paper in a scholarly journal.

The claim “that scientific facts are constructed and not discovered” is, according to T. Hugh Crawford, one of the most productive elements in Laboratory Life . 56 Mark Morrisson accords with this view, though he focuses on Science in Action where Latour gives an account of the “black box” view of science: a fact or a machine has been black boxed when, “no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count.” 57 Latour’s approach, by contrast, is to uncover the workings of the black box and to emphasize science “in the making” or “in action.” Nicolson and others working in the History of Ideas tradition could rightly be criticized for black boxing ideas from science, focusing only the outputs—completed ideas—and then considering literary representations and responses. But in 1962 , Kuhn’s emphasis on paradigm shifts had reminded scholars that theories are actively constructed. In Darwin’s Plots , a great deal of Beer’s discussion concerns Darwin’s struggle to frame his theory in the right way and to balance different intellectual and ideological claims; she repeatedly characterizes his theory as shifting and unsettled. It is true that her focus is on the making of a scientific theory, while Crawford draws attention to the construction of facts. But Beer also analyzes the adjectives with which Darwin modified “fact”—facts were often “wonderful” or “extraordinary”—and the wider cultural discourse on fact. The latter yields conclusions that suggest that Science in Action and Darwin’s Plots share common roots in the pre-Latourian science studies of the 1970s: as Beer notes, “In their use of the word fact they [the Victorians] often combine the idea of performance with that of observation. Fact is deed as much as object, the thing done as much as the thing categorised.” Moreover, facts are performed through acts of rhetorical assertion: “The word ‘fact’ authenticates.” 58 Although Latour, with concepts such as black boxing, has devised more sophisticated tools for discussing method in literature and science, if the field is seen as primarily a historicist critical practice, then it is clear that “inscription” and “science in the making” were established within that practice before Latour’s conceptualizations of them were widely known.

Although Latour’s work is often identified with science studies, his thinking has diverged from SSK. In this regard, in the field of literature and science, his work has seemed to offer an escape route from several related dead ends or polarized binaries. Although in the 1980s the field focused on science in the making in the sense of theory formation, it had little to say about the day-to-day experience of science as an activity. Its emphasis was on science as knowledge, not science as practice. Moreover, it had little to say about the materiality of science, whether understood to be the built and socially organized spaces in which scientific activity takes place or the materiality of scientific experiments, instruments, and samples. It is widely recognized that around 1989 , there was a material turn in the history of science: chapters by Simon Shaffer and J. A. Bennett in the collection The Uses of Experiment ( 1989 ) have been seen as prominent early examples. 59 The material turn may also be understood as a pragmatic turn or turn to practice. Closely connected to the material turn is a spatial one that takes as its objects such things as the laboratory, the museum, the field (as in scientific “field work”), and the garden. 60 The material and pragmatic turns in science studies may seem to displace metaphor as a central concern of the field of literature and science. One possible response is to conceive of the field branching away from science studies, retaining its concern with figurative conceptualization as a necessary point of connection between literature and science. However, it is also possible to see a continuing role for metaphor in a newly material account of science. 61

In 1992 , Andrew Pickering, noting the emerging interest in scientific practice, argued that SSK’s focus on science as knowledge had reached a conceptual impasse. SSK saw the “technical culture of science” as a “single conceptual network,” and insofar as it was interested in science as practice, it saw practice “as the creative extension of the conceptual net to fit new circumstances.” Moreover, it saw practice as guided by interest, in the sense of factional “interests.” 62 In Pickering’s summary, SSK’s account of science is “thin, idealized, and reductive”; it lacks the “conceptual apparatus” to capture “the richness of doing science, the dense work of building instruments, planning, running, and interpreting experiments, elaborating theory, negotiating with laboratory managements, journals, grant-giving agencies, and so on.” 63 It may achieve conceptual closure in its explanations, but it does so at the cost of terrible reductiveness. Joseph Rouse, developing Pickering’s argument, identifies a structural problem with sociological explanation: scientific knowledge, the thing to be explained, must be sharply differentiated from the social, the factor that explains it. 64 This binary reproduces the science’s inaugurating binary division of the world into observer and observed, science and nature; these conceptual dichotomies “guarantee the very hegemony of the natural sciences” that SSK wishes to dispute. 65 Latour—and Actor-Network Theory more generally—promise an escape from a deadlocked binary opposition in which scientific knowledge is either given by nature or “dictated by society.” 66

Surveying this argument, James Bono notes that the position taken by Pickering and Rouse is by no means the only one possible: for example, Peter Dear has argued persuasively for a “sociocultural” history of science. Moreover, in a move analogous to the present argument, Bono notes that Latour was far from the first to contest the foundational binaries within science studies. 67 However, if literature and science is conceived as a historicist critical practice, it can be seen that the most widely imitated practitioners have, when confronted by binaries of realism and social constructivism, found ways of negotiating between them, which keep in play the claims of both. The negotiation is to be found not in the conceptual apparatus of any particular body of theory, but in the critical writing itself at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, and above. It is found in an agile movement between particular phrases, situated in their complex social and discursive networks, and reflexive considerations of method. Pickering’s criticism of conceptual closure parallels the concerns of many literature and science practitioners. A significant criticism of Nicolson’s work is that, by settling literature on a scientific base, she excludes “other simultaneous significations” and “over-stabilize[s]” the reading, even when praising “innovation and disturbance.” 68 One procedure for resisting such stabilization is to introduce points of reference beyond the binary of literature and science: a “third element” that creates instabilities in the binary. Jenkins gives the example of Laura Otis using imperial discourse in relation to 19th-century biology and literature; the present author, writing about spacetime in modernism and in post-Einsteinian popular science writing, turned to global telegraph systems and the discourse around simultaneity that accompanied them. 69 The introduction of the third element does not in itself guarantee destabilization: it is equally possible for it to be recruited as the factor that monocausally “explains” both the science and the literature. The avoidance of such reductiveness requires careful conceptualization of relations between the elements, but also involves care in the writing. Even in full-length monographs, the spirit of essayism is an important one to the discipline in the sense of a form of writing that is tentative, exploratory, and provisional.

This article has considered only three concepts strongly associated with Latour: literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation. Many others may be examined in a similar way, with the aim of distinguishing what is truly original in his work and what has precedents in earlier theory and practice in the field. His notion of “technoscience” would be high on the list. 70 So too would his extension of agency to nonhuman actants, a move that shines an interesting light on the field’s unresolved relation to conventional humanist notions of agency.

One unfortunate and unintended effect of George Rousseau’s 1978 “State of the Field” essay is that, in rejecting the works of the philologists and even of Nicolson, it inaugurated a dynamic of supersession in which each new generation of critics ritually rejects the methodologies and conceptual tools of the previous one. The present article has not been innocent of the practice in relation to Nicolson; it is easy to caricature her work and it deserves a more sympathetic revaluation. The tendency to identify a valid method with Latour’s work is a symptom of this dynamic. To restrict the conceptual toolbox of the field and to dismiss older practices as unsophisticated is to impoverish its possibilities. Practitioners in the field need to recognize the critical concepts that are implicit in apparently untheorized moves and that are embodied in the writing, though never explicitly named. Practitioners achieve what they have done by standing on the shoulders of giants, by surveying the full range of past critical practices rather than simply looking out for the next wave.

Discussion of the Literature

A student-oriented introduction to critical work in the field is presented by Willis and another is presented by Morrisson, with a chronological focus on modernism. 71

Rousseau’s 1978 survey of the field inaugurated a subgenre of reflective survey: following him, in 1987 Peterfreund identified the importance of figurative language as crucial to the resurgence of the discipline while Bono, in 2010 , highlighted the turn to the performative and the material, as well as the growing importance of Bruno Latour. 72 In 1981 , Rousseau performed a similar service for literature and medicine. Since then, work in that field has tended to focus on narrative in clinical case reports and case histories, and on trying to recover the perspective of patients from documents dominated by clinicians. 73 In 2017 and 2018 , under the general title “The State of the Unions,” special editions of the journals Configurations and Journal of Literature and Science surveyed the field from a range of viewpoints from both sides of the Atlantic. 74 Though in the early 1980s works on literature and technology were less theoretically reflective than those on literature and science, the theoretical perspectives of Donna Haraway—particularly her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” and her collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature —and of Friedrich Kittler have been highly influential; works by Armstrong and Goody have developed the field in a more theoretically reflexive direction. 75

Beer’s 1989 survey is particularly strong on questions of influence and interchange, and Jenkins’s 2016 discussion of method gives significant space to the “one culture” and “two-way traffic” models. 76 Levine’s personal reflections on the growth of the field give an account from the perspective of someone trained in mid- 20th-century close reading and also reflect on the unavoidability, even in historicist work, of making scientific truth claims. 77 Levine’s “Why Science Isn’t Literature” valuably reflects on the importance of differences. 78

On metaphor, Ortony’s collection of essays is still valuable; Lakoff and Johnson’s work has been less influential in the field than may be expected; Whitworth and Bono note the difficulty with its argument that metaphors are grounded in the body. 79 Griffiths focuses on analogy as distinct from metaphor, differentiating formal and harmonic analogies. 80

Given that the science in literature and the literature in science are often visible only in fleeting glimpses, questions of validity and evidence recur: Lance Schachterle provided some valuable practical criteria in 1987 , as did N. Katherine Hayles in 1991 . 81

The relations of history of science with science studies have been constantly changing: Daston gives a very clear account that is in part a response to Jasanoff. 82 There have been dissenting voices in relation to Latour from several perspectives. 83 For the debates between sociology of scientific knowledge and Latourian Actor-Network Theory, Pickering’s collection of essays is crucial, though best approached through essays by Rouse and Bono. 84 The role of feminist studies of science has provided the field of literature and science with a significant social point of reference. Work by Keller and Harding was especially influential in the 1980s and 1990s. 85

Further Reading

• Beer, Gillian . Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
• Beer, Gillian . Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter . Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
• Biagioli, Mario , ed. The Science Studies Reader . New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Clarke, Bruce . Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
• Hayles, N. Katherine , ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Henderson, Linda Dalrymple . The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art . Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Leonardo Books, 2013.
• Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
• Latour, Bruno , and Steve Woolgar . Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts . 2nd ed. New postscript and index by the authors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
• Leane, Elizabeth . Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies . Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
• Levine, George , ed. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
• Levine, George . Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Middleton, Peter . Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Ortony, Andrew , ed. Metaphor and Thought . 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Peterfreund, Stuart , ed. Literature and Science: Theory & Practice . Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990.
• Preston, Claire . The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Willis, Martin . Literature and Science: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism . London: Palgrave, 2015.

1. For an overview of Victorian “scientific” literary criticism, see Peter Garratt, “Scientific Literary Criticism,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science , ed. John Holmes and Sharon Ruston (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 115–127; the best-known early 20th-century example is I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1924).

2. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005); Joseph Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study,” Style 42, no. 2–3 (2008): 103–135; and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009).

3. Eugene Goodheart, “Do We Need Literary Darwinism?” Style 42, no. 2–3 (2008): 181–185; Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 315–347; and Alan Richardson, “Literary Studies and Cognitive Science,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 207–222, 208–209.

4. Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Science,” in The Complete Prose Works , ed. Robert Henry Super (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974 [1882]), vol. 10, 53–73; and Thomas Henry Huxley “Science and Culture,” Nature 22 (October 1880): 545–548.

5. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

6. George S. Rousseau, “Literature and Science: The State of the Field,” Isis 69, no. 4 (1978): 583–591; and Stuart Peterfreund, “Literature and Science: The Present State of the Field,” Studies in Literature 19, no. 1 (1987): 25–36, 26.

7. Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 584–585.

8. Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 585, note 7; George Levine, “Why Science Isn’t Literature: The Importance of Differences,” Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 167 ; and Gillian Beer, “Science and Literature,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science , ed. Geoffrey N. Cantor et al. (London: Routledge, 1989), 790.

9. David Bloor, “Two Paradigms for Scientific Knowledge?” Science Studies 1, no. 1 (1971): 101–115.

10. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 1 .

11. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 195 .

12. N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 39.

13. Kuhn, Structure , 190.

14. Max Black, “More About Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought , ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27 ; also an essential point of reference is Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , n.s. 55 (1954): 273–294.

15. Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 17–20, 27–39.

16. Norman Campbell quoted by Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 5.

17. Hesse, Models and Analogies , 4.

18. Susan Merrill Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 26.

19. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Metaphor in Science” in Metaphor and Thought , ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 533–542 (539) .

20. Kuhn, Structure , xliv.

21. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 268; similarly, Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 208–209; and George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 276.

22. Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004), 25 (n. 23).

23. George S. Rousseau, “Introduction,” Configurations 7, no. 2 (1999): 127–136; Frank Palmeri, “History of Narrative Genres after Foucault,” Configurations 7, no. 2 (1999): 267–277.

24. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 6–7.

25. Peterfreund, “Literature and Science: The Present State,” 28.

26. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 32, 41.

27. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 99, her emphasis.

28. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 100, her emphasis.

29. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 173.

30. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production , trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 92; and Beer cites Macherey (alongside Derrida) in relation to the question of origins: Darwin’s Plots , 18.

31. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 52.

32. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 7; Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 587; and Morse Peckham, “Darwinism and Darwinisticism,” Victorian Studies 3, no. 1 (1959): 19–40.

33. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 97; elsewhere, Beer quotes from Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: Darwin’s Plots , 62.

34. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 38, 92, 94.

35. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (1947; rev. ed. London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 1–7.

36. Marilyn Strathern, quoted by Squier, Babies in Bottles , 26–27.

37. Richard Rorty, “Texts and Lumps,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008): 53–68, 3.

38. R. G. A. Dolby, “Sociology of Knowledge in Natural Science,” Science Studies 1, no. 1 (1971): 3–21, 5.

39. Joseph Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 1–22, 3–4.

40. David Bloor, “Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 4, no. 2 (1973): 173–191, 173–174.

41. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 4; Levine, Darwin and the Novelists , 6.

42. Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 587.

43. Alice Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures: Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries,” in Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture , ed. Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 402–416, 407–410.

44. Steven Meyer, “Introduction,” Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5; and Devin Griffiths, “Darwin and Literature,” Cambridge Companion , 67.

45. Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures,” 410–412.

46. Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures,” 412.

47. Mark S. Morrisson, Modernism, Science, and Technology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 21–25; and Meyer, “Introduction,” 1–21.

48. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 281 .

49. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 252, n. 11.

50. Bruno Latour, “Pasteur on Lactic Acid Yeast: A Partial Semiotic Analysis,” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 129–146; Bruno Latour and T. Hugh Crawford, “An Interview with Bruno Latour,” Configurations 1 no. 2 (1993): 247–268; the Society for Literature and Science was founded in 1985, but since 2004, it has been known as the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, or SLSA.

51. See, e.g., Timothy Lenoir, “Was the Last Turn the Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas,” Configurations 2, no. 1 (1994): 119–136.

52. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 48, 49.

53. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 51–52.

54. Griffiths, “Darwin and Literature,” 64; his emphasis.

55. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 15; and Gillian Beer, “Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development,” in The Darwinian Heritage , ed. D. Kohn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 543–588.

56. T. Hugh Crawford, “Science Studies and Literary Theory,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 121.

57. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), 3; discussed in Morrisson, Modernism , 23.

58. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 81, her emphases.

59. Schaffer and Bennett are instanced by Liba Taub, “Introduction: Reengaging with Instruments,” Isis 102, no. 4 (2011): 689–696; for a fuller discussion of the “material turn,” see Thomas Söderqvist, [untitled review], The British Journal for the History of Science 43, no. 3 (2010): 506–508.

60. Crosbie Smith, Jon Agar, and Gerald Schmidt, eds., Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 1998); and David N. Livingstone, “Making Space for Science (Produktion Von Räumen Der Wissenschaft),” Erdkunde 54, no. 4 (2000): 285–296.

61. James J. Bono, “Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice,” in Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge , ed. Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2001), 215–234.

62. Andrew Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice,” in Science as Practice and Culture , ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–26, 4.

63. Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge,” 5.

64. Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” 9–10; see also Bruno Latour, “One More Turn After the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the Non-Modern World,” in The Social Dimensions of Science , ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), 272–292.

65. Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge,” 20.

66. Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge,” 21.

67. James J. Bono, “Science Studies as Cultural Studies,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , 156–175; and Peter Dear, “Cultural History of Science: An Overview with Reflections,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 20, no. 2 (1995): 150–170.

68. Beer, “Science and Literature,” 789.

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75. Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Lisa M. Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Donna Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65–107; Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , trans. Michael Metteer, and Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011).

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77. George Levine, “Science and Victorian Literature: A Personal Retrospective,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12, no. 1 (2007): 86–96.

78. Levine, “Why Science Isn’t Literature,” 165–181.

79. Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993) ; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake , 8–16; and Bono, “Why Metaphor?.”

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The Importance of Literature Review in Scientific Research Writing

Can Meta-Analysis be Systematic Review?

Tips For How to Edit a Scientific Manuscript For Publication

Literature reviews are an important part of the scientific research process and communication. While systematic reviews have become the global standard for evidence synthesis, many literature reviews fall short of these expectations and may present biased or incorrect conclusions. In this post, we discussed common issues with Literature search services methods, provided examples for each, and offered practical solutions for mitigating them.

Introduction

All scientific research begins with a review of the literature. Every scientific research builds on previous knowledge as a systematic investigation to spread new conclusions and establish facts. To conduct research that adds value to the field, precise awareness of the level of wisdom on a subject is required. There is no formal literature review definition for a research paper in medical education; thus, a literature review can take many forms. These forms will differ in methodology, rigor, and depth depending on the type of article, target journal, and specific topic. Several organizations, both broadly and specifically, have published guidelines for conducting an intensive literature search in preparation for formal systematic reviews (e.g., PRISMA)

A scientific literature review is a survey of scientific books, scholarly articles, and any other Clinical Literature Review Services relevant to a specific issue, area of study, or theory that provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of a concept, school of thought, or ideas about the research question under investigation. Furthermore, the literature review familiarizes the author with the extensiveness of their knowledge in their field. When presented as part of the paper, it establishes the author’s depth of understanding and knowledge of the subject to the readers.

The literature in a field that is scientifically significant includes, among other things, previous studies in the field, well-known schools of thought, scholarly articles, and scientific journals. Every field uses a different style of literature review. In the hard sciences, the literature consists primarily of factual information, and the review may be as simple as a summary of the important sources. On the other hand, the survey of soft sciences provides an overview and synthesis of many schools of thought and how they are connected. A summary or an outline is a succinct account of all informational highlights from essential sources, whereas synthesis is the restructuring or rearrangement of the material to guide the dissertation’s plan of exploring the research subject.

The following are some of the ways a literature review adds value and legitimacy to a study:

• Literature review writing services allow for the interpretation of old literature in graceful new developments in the field; this aids in establishing knowledge consistency and the relevance of older materials.
• The evolution of knowledge in the subject is traced while studying the literature, and how the dialectics of inconsistencies between distinct concepts within the field helped establish facts is discovered.
• This helps to assess the effect of new knowledge in the area. The literature is largely evaluated to discover knowledge gaps in the topic, and these gaps are further probed throughout the study to develop new facts or hypotheses that offer value to the area.
• The idea of performing a rigorous and methodical investigation involves a critical analysis of current information, which necessitates a literature review.
• The literature review help also aids in determining the current study’s place in the field’s schema.

We highlight 8 common issues with traditional literature review methods and provide examples from the field of scientific research for each.

The literature review article helps verifies the study by giving information on its relevance and coherence to current knowledge and research methodologies. As a result, it establishes the author’s experience in the topic and offers legitimacy to carry forward the wisdom of the field through scientific and methodical techniques. While demonstrating the continuity of knowledge, the literature review also identifies areas that demand more inquiry and serves as a starting point for future research.

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Explaining research performance: investigating the importance of motivation

• Original Paper
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• Published: 23 May 2024
• Volume 4 , article number  105 , ( 2024 )

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• Silje Marie Svartefoss   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5072-1293 1   nAff4 ,
• Jens Jungblut 2 ,
• Dag W. Aksnes 1 ,
• Kristoffer Kolltveit 2 &
• Thed van Leeuwen 3  

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In this article, we study the motivation and performance of researchers. More specifically, we investigate what motivates researchers across different research fields and countries and how this motivation influences their research performance. The basis for our study is a large-N survey of economists, cardiologists, and physicists in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK. The analysis shows that researchers are primarily motivated by scientific curiosity and practical application and less so by career considerations. There are limited differences across fields and countries, suggesting that the mix of motivational aspects has a common academic core less influenced by disciplinary standards or different national environments. Linking motivational factors to research performance, through bibliometric data on publication productivity and citation impact, our data show that those driven by practical application aspects of motivation have a higher probability for high productivity. Being driven by career considerations also increases productivity but only to a certain extent before it starts having a detrimental effect.

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Introduction

Motivation and abilities are known to be as important factors in explaining employees’ job performance of employees (Van Iddekinge et al. 2018 ), and in the vast scientific literature on motivation, it is common to differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors (Ryan and Deci 2000 ). In this context, path-breaking individuals are said to often be intrinsically motivated (Jindal-Snape and Snape 2006 ; Thomas and Nedeva 2012 ; Vallerand et al. 1992 ), and it has been found that the importance of these of types of motivations differs across occupations and career stages (Duarte and Lopes 2018 ).

In this article, we address the issue of motivation for one specific occupation, namely: researchers working at universities. Specifically, we investigate what motivates researchers across fields and countries (RQ1) and how this motivation is linked to their research performance (RQ2). The question of why people are motivated to do their jobs is interesting to address in an academic context, where work is usually harder to control, and individuals tend to have a lot of much freedom in structuring their work. Moreover, there have been indications that academics possess an especially high level of motivation for their tasks that is not driven by a search for external rewards but by an intrinsic satisfaction from academic work (Evans and Meyer 2003 ; Leslie 2002 ). At the same time, elements of researchers’ performance are measurable through indicators of their publication activity: their productivity through the number of outputs they produce and the impact of their research through the number of citations their publications receive (Aksnes and Sivertsen 2019 ; Wilsdon et al. 2015 ).

Elevating research performance is high on the agenda of many research organisations (Hazelkorn 2015 ). How such performance may be linked to individuals’ motivational aspects has received little attention. Thus, a better understanding of this interrelation may be relevant for developing institutional strategies to foster environments that promote high-quality research and research productivity.

Previous qualitative research has shown that scientists are mainly intrinsically motivated (Jindal-Snape and Snape 2006 ). Other survey-based contributions suggest that there can be differences in motivations across disciplines (Atta-Owusu and Fitjar 2021 ; Lam 2011 ). Furthermore, the performance of individual scientists has been shown to be highly skewed in terms of publication productivity and citation rates (Larivière et al. 2010 ; Ruiz-Castillo and Costas 2014 ). There is a large body of literature explaining these differences. Some focus on national and institutional funding schemes (Hammarfelt and de Rijcke 2015 ; Melguizo and Strober 2007 ) and others on the research environment, such as the presence of research groups and international collaboration (Jeong et al. 2014 ), while many studies address the role of academic rank, age, and gender (see e.g. Baccini et al. 2014 ; Rørstad and Aksnes 2015 ). Until recently, less emphasis has been placed on the impact of researchers’ motivation. Some studies have found that different types of motivations drive high levels of research performance (see e.g. Horodnic and Zaiţ 2015 ; Ryan and Berbegal-Mirabent 2016 ). However, researchers are only starting to understand how this internal drive relates to research performance.

While some of the prior research on the impact of motivation depends on self-reported research performance evaluations (Ryan 2014 ), the present article combines survey responses with actual bibliometric data. To investigate variation in research motivation across scientific fields and countries, we draw on a large-N survey of economists, cardiologists, and physicists in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK. To investigate how this motivation is linked to their research performance, we map the survey respondents’ publication and citation data from the Web of Science (WoS).

This article is organised as follows. First, we present relevant literature on research performance and motivation. Next, the scientific fields and countries are then presented before elaborating on our methodology. In the empirical analysis, we investigate variations in motivation across fields, gender, age, and academic position and then relate motivation to publications and citations as our two measures of research performance. In the concluding section, we discuss our findings and implications for national decision-makers and individual researchers.

Motivation and research performance

As noted above, the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation play an important role in the literature on motivation and performance. Here, intrinsic motivation refers to doing something for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. Extrinsic motivation refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome (Ryan and Deci 2000 ).

Some studies have found that scientists are mainly intrinsically motivated (Jindal-Snape and Snape 2006 ; Lounsbury et al. 2012 ). Research interests, curiosity, and a desire to contribute to new knowledge are examples of such motivational factors. Intrinsic motives have also been shown to be crucial when people select research as a career choice (Roach and Sauermann 2010 ). Nevertheless, scientists are also motivated by extrinsic factors. Several European countries have adopted performance-based research funding systems (Zacharewicz et al. 2019 ). In these systems, researchers do not receive direct financial bonuses when they publish, although such practices may occur at local levels (Stephan et al. 2017 ). Therefore, extrinsic motivation for such researchers may include salary increases, peer recognitions, promotion, or expanded access to research resources (Lam 2011 ). According to Tien and Blackburn ( 1996 ), both types of motivations operate simultaneously, and their importance vary and may depend on the individual’s circumstances, personal situation, and values.

The extent to which different kinds of motivations play a role in scientists’ performance has been investigated in several studies. In these studies, bibliometric indicators based on the number of publications are typically used as outcome measures. Such indicators play a critical role in various contexts in the research system (Wilsdon et al. 2015 ), although it has also been pointed out that individuals can have different motivations to publish (Hangel and Schmidt-Pfister 2017 ).

Based on a survey of Romanian economics and business administration academics combined with bibliometric data, Horodnic and Zait ( 2015 ) found that intrinsic motivation was positively correlated with research productivity, while extrinsic motivation was negatively correlated. Their interpretations of the results are that researchers motivated by scientific interest are more productive, while researchers motivated by extrinsic forces will shift their focus to more financially profitable activities. Similarly, based on the observation that professors continue to publish even after they have been promoted to full professor, Finkelstein ( 1984 ) concluded that intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivational factors have a decisive role regarding the productivity of academics.

Drawing on a survey of 405 research scientists working in biological, chemical, and biomedical research departments in UK universities, Ryan ( 2014 ) found that (self-reported) variations in research performance can be explained by instrumental motivation based on financial incentives and internal motivation based on the individual’s view of themselves (traits, competencies, and values). In the study, instrumental motivation was found to have a negative impact on research performance: As the desire for financial rewards increase, the level of research performance decreases. In other words, researchers mainly motivated by money will be less productive and effective in their research. Contrarily, internal motivation was found to have a positive impact on research performance. This was explained by highlighting that researchers motivated by their self-concept set internal standards that become a reference point that reinforces perceptions of competency in their environments.

Nevertheless, it has also been argued that intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for publishing are intertwined (Ma 2019 ). According to Tien and Blackburn ( 1996 ), research productivity is neither purely intrinsically nor purely extrinsically motivated. Publication activity is often a result of research, which may be intrinsically motivated or motivated by extrinsic factors such as a wish for promotion, where the number of publications is often a part of the assessment (Cruz-Castro and Sanz-Menendez 2021 ; Tien 2000 , 2008 ).

The negative relationship between external/instrumental motivation and performance and the positive relationship between internal/self-concept motivation and performance are underlined by Ryan and Berbegal-Mirabent ( 2016 ). Drawing on a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis of a random sampling of 300 of the original respondents from Ryan ( 2014 ), they find that scientists working towards the standards and values they identify with, combined with a lack of concern for instrumental rewards, contribute to higher levels of research performance.

Based on the above, this article will address two research questions concerning different forms of motivation and the relationship between motivation and research performance.

How does the motivation of researchers vary across fields and countries?

How do different types of motivations affect research performance?

In this study, the roles of three different motivational factors are analysed. These are scientific curiosity, practical and societal applications, and career progress. The study aims to assess the role of these specific motivational factors and not the intrinsic-extrinsic distinction more generally. Of the three factors, scientific curiosity most strongly relates to intrinsic motivation; practical and societal applications also entail strong intrinsic aspects. On the other hand, career progress is linked to extrinsic motivation.

In addition to variation in researchers’ motivations by field and country, we consider differences in relation to age, position and gender. Additionally, when investigating how motivation relates to scientific performance we control for the influence of age, gender, country and funding. These are dimensions where differences might be found in motivational factors given that scientific performance, particularly publication productivity, has been shown to differ along these dimensions (Rørstad and Aksnes 2015 ).

Research context: three fields, five countries

To address the research question about potential differences across fields and countries, the study is based on a sample consisting of researchers in three different fields (cardiology, economics, and physics) and five countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK). Below, we describe this research context in greater detail.

The fields represent three different domains of science: medicine, social sciences, and the natural sciences, where different motivational factors may be at play. This means that the fields cover three main areas of scientific investigations: the understanding of the world, the functioning of the human body, and societies and their functions. The societal role and mission of the fields also differ. While a primary aim of cardiology research and practice is to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease, physics research may drive technology advancements, which impacts society. Economics research may contribute to more effective use of limited resources and the management of people, businesses, markets, and governments. In addition, the fields also differ in publication patterns (Piro et al. 2013 ). The average number of publications per researcher is generally higher in cardiology and physics than in economics (Piro et al. 2013 ). Moreover, cardiologists and physicists mainly publish in international scientific journals (Moed 2005 ; Van Leeuwen 2013 ). In economics, researchers also tend to publish books, chapters, and articles in national languages, in addition to international journal articles (Aksnes and Sivertsen 2019 ; van Leeuwen et al. 2016 ).

We sampled the countries with a twofold aim. On the one hand, we wanted to have countries that are comparable so that differences in the development of the science systems, working conditions, or funding availability would not be too large. On the other hand, we also wanted to assure variation among the countries regarding these relevant framework conditions to ensure that our findings are not driven by a specific contextual condition.

The five countries in the study are all located in the northwestern part of Europe, with science systems that are foremost funded by block grant funding from the national governments (unlike, for example, the US, where research grants by national funding agencies are the most important funding mechanism) (Lepori et al. 2023 ).

In all five countries, the missions of the universities are composed of a blend of education, research, and outreach. Furthermore, the science systems in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a relatively strong orientation towards the Anglo-Saxon world in the sense that publishing in the national language still exists, but publishing in English in internationally oriented journals in which English is the language of publications is the norm (Kulczycki et al. 2018 ). These framework conditions ensure that those working in the five countries have somewhat similar missions to fulfil in their professions while also belonging to a common mainly Anglophone science system.

However, in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, research findings in some social sciences, law, and the humanities are still oriented on publishing in various languages. Hence, we avoided selecting the humanities field for this study due to a potential issue with cross-country comparability (Sivertsen 2019 ; Sivertsen and Van Leeuwen 2014 ; Van Leeuwen 2013 ).

Finally, the chosen countries vary regarding their level of university autonomy. When combining the scores for organisational, financial, staffing, and academic autonomy presented in the latest University Autonomy in Europe Scorecard presented by the European University Association (EUA), the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark have higher levels of autonomy compared to Norway and Sweden, with Swedish universities having less autonomy than their Norwegian counterparts (Pruvot et al. 2023 ). This variation is relevant for our study, as it ensures that our findings are not driven by response from a higher education system with especially high or low autonomy, which can influence the motivation and satisfaction of academics working in it (Daumiller et al. 2020 ).

Data and methods

The data used in this article are a combination of survey data and bibliometric data retrieved from the WoS. The WoS database was chosen for this study due to its comprehensive coverage of research literature across all disciplines, encompassing the three specific research areas under analysis. Additionally, the WoS database is well-suited for bibliometric analyses, offering citation counts essential for this study.

Two approaches were used to identify the sample for the survey. Initially, a bibliometric analysis of the WoS using journal categories (‘Cardiac & cardiovascular systems’, ‘Economics’, and ‘Physics’) enabled the identification of key institutions with a minimum number of publications within these journal categories. Following this, relevant organisational units and researchers within these units were identified through available information on the units’ webpages. Included were employees in relevant academic positions (tenured academic personnel, post-docs, and researchers, but not PhD students, adjunct positions, guest researchers, or administrative and technical personnel).

Second, based on the WoS data, people were added to this initial sample if they had a minimum number of publications within the field and belonged to any of the selected institutions, regardless of unit affiliation. For economics, the minimum was five publications within the selected period (2011–2016). For cardiology and physics, where the individual publication productivity is higher, the minimum was 10 publications within the same period. The selection of the minimum publication criteria was based on an analysis of publication outputs in these fields between 2011 and 2016. The thresholds were applied to include individuals who are more actively engaged in research while excluding those with more peripheral involvement. The higher thresholds for cardiology and physics reflect the greater frequency of publications (and co-authorship) observed in these fields.

The benefit of this dual-approach strategy to sampling is that we obtain a more comprehensive sample: the full scope of researchers within a unit and the full scope of researchers that publish within the relevant fields. Overall, 59% of the sample were identified through staff lists and 41% through the second step involving WoS data.

The survey data were collected through an online questionnaire first sent out in October 2017 and closed in December 2018. In this period, several reminders were sent to increase the response rate. Overall, the survey had a response rate of 26.1% ( N  = 2,587 replies). There were only minor variations in response rates between scientific fields; the variations were larger between countries. Tables  1 and 2 provide an overview of the response rate by country and field.

Operationalisation of motivation

Motivation was measured by a question in the survey asking respondents what motivates or inspires them to conduct research, of which three dimensions are analysed in the present paper. The two first answer categories were related to intrinsic motivation (‘Curiosity/scientific discovery/understanding the world’ and ‘Application/practical aims/creating a better society’). The third answer category was more related to extrinsic motivation (‘Progress in my career [e.g. tenure/permanent position, higher salary, more interesting/independent work]’). Appendix Table A1 displays the distribution of respondents and the mean value and standard deviation for each item.

These three different aspects of motivation do not measure the same phenomenon but seem to capture different aspects of motivation (see Pearson’s correlation coefficients in Appendix Table A2 ). There is no correlation between curiosity/scientific discovery, career progress, and practical application. However, there is a weak but significant positive correlation between career progress and practical application. These findings indicate that those motivated by career considerations to some degrees also are motivated by practical application.

In addition to investigating how researchers’ motivation varies by field and country, we consider the differences in relation to age, position and gender as well. Field of science differentiates between economics, cardiology, physics, and other fields. The country variables differentiate between the five countries. Age is a nine-category variable. The position variable differentiates between full professors, associate professors, and assistant professors. The gender variable has two categories (male or female). For descriptive statistics on these additional variables, see Appendix Table A3 .

Publication productivity and citation impact

To analyse the respondents’ bibliometric performance, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in-house WoS database was used. We identified the publication output of each respondent during 2011–2017 (limited to regular articles, reviews, and letters). For 16% of the respondents, no publications were identified in the database. These individuals had apparently not published in international journals covered by the database. However, in some cases, the lack of publications may be due to identification problems (e.g. change of names). Therefore, we decided not to include the latter respondents in the analysis.

Two main performance measures were calculated: publication productivity and citation impact. As an indicator of productivity, we counted the number of publications for each individual (as author or co-author) during the period. To analyse the citation impact, a composite measure using three different indicators was used: total number of citations (total citations counts for all articles they have contributed to during the period, counting citations up to and including 2017), normalised citation score (MNCS), and proportion of publications among the 10% most cited articles in their fields (Waltman and Schreiber 2013 ). Here, the MNCS is an indicator for which the citation count of each article is normalised by subject, article type, and year, where 1.00 corresponds to the world average (Waltman et al. 2011 ). Based on these data, averages for the total publication output of each respondent were calculated. By using three different indicators, we can avoid biases or limitations attached to each of them. For example, using the MNCS, a respondent with only one publication would appear as a high impact researcher if this article was highly cited. However, when considering the additional indicator, total citation counts, this individual would usually perform less well.

The bibliometric scores were skewedly distributed among the respondents. Rather than using the absolute numbers, in this paper, we have classified the respondents into three groups according to their scores on the indicators. Here, we have used percentile rank classes (tertiles). Percentile statistics are increasingly applied in bibliometrics (Bornmann et al. 2013 ; Waltman and Schreiber 2013 ) due to the presence of outliers and long tails, which characterise both productivity and citation distributions.

As the fields analysed have different publication patterns, the respondents within each field were ranked according to their scores on the indicators, and their percentile rank was determined. For the productivity measure, this means that there are three groups that are equal in terms of number of individuals included: 1: Low productivity (the group with the lowest publication numbers, 0–33 percentile), 2: Medium productivity (33–67 percentile), and 3: High productivity (67–100 percentile). For the citation impact measure, we conducted a similar percentile analysis for each of the three composite indicators. Then everyone was assigned to one of the three percentile groups based on their average score: 1: Low citation impact (the group with lowest citation impact, 0–33 percentile), 2: Medium citation impact (33–67 percentile), and 3: High citation impact (67–100 percentile), cf. Table  3 . Although it might be argued that the application of tertile groups rather than absolute numbers leads to a loss of information, the advantage is that the results are not influenced by extreme values and may be easier to interpret.

Via this approach, we can analyse the two important dimensions of the respondents’ performance. However, it should be noted that the WoS database does not cover the publication output of the fields equally. Generally, physics and cardiology are very well covered, while the coverage of economics is somewhat lower due to different publication practices (Aksnes and Sivertsen 2019 ). This problem is accounted for in our study by ranking the respondents in each field separately, as described above. In addition, not all respondents may have been active researchers during the entire 2011–2017 period, which we have not adjusted for. Despite these limitations, the analysis provides interesting information on the bibliometric performance of the respondents at an aggregated level.

Regression analysis

To analyse the relationship between motivation and performance, we apply multinomial logistic regression rather then ordered logistic regression because we assume that the odds for respondents belonging in each category of the dependent variables are not equal (Hilbe 2017 ). The implication of this choice of model is that the model tests the probability of respondents being in one category compared to another (Hilbe 2017 ). This means that a reference or baseline category must be selected for each of the dependent variables (productivity and citation impact). Furthermore, the coefficient estimates show how the probability of being in one of the other categories decreases or increases compared to being in the reference category.

For this analysis, we selected the medium performers as the reference or baseline category for both our dependent variables. This enables us to evaluate how the independent variables affect the probability of being in the low performers group compared to the medium performers and the high performers compared to the medium performers.

To evaluate model fit, we started with a baseline model where only types of motivations were included as independent variables. Subsequently, the additional variables were introduced into the model, and based on measures for model fit (Pseudo R 2 , -2LL, and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)), we concluded that the model with all additional variables included provides the best fit to the data for both the dependent variables (see Appendix Tables A5 and A6 ). Additional control variables include age, gender, country, and funding. We include these variables as controls to obtain robust effects of motivation and not effects driven by other underlying factors. The type of funding was measured by variables where the respondent answered the following question: ‘How has your research been funded the last five years?’ The funding variable initially consisted of four categories: ‘No source’, ‘Minor source’, ‘Moderate source’, and ‘Major source’. In this analysis, we have combined ‘No source’ and ‘Minor source’ into one category (0) and ‘Moderate source’ and ‘Major source’ into another category (1). Descriptive statistics for the funding variables are available in Appendix Table A4 . We do not control for the influence of field due to how the scientific performance variables are operationalised, the field normalisation implies that there are no variations across fields. We also do not control for position, as this variable is highly correlated with age, and we are therefore unable to include these two variables in the same model.

The motivation of researchers

In the empirical analysis, we first investigate variation in motivation and then relate it to publications and citations as our two measures of research performance.

As Fig.  1 shows, the respondents are mainly driven by curiosity and the wish to make scientific discoveries. This is by far the most important motivation. Practical application is also an important source of motivation, while making career progress is not identified as being very important.

Motivation of researchers– percentage

As Table  4 shows, at the level of fields, there are no large differences, and the motivational profiles are relatively similar. However, physicists tend to view practical application as somewhat less important than cardiologists and economists. Moreover, career progress is emphasised most by economists. Furthermore, as table 5 shows, there are some differences in motivation between countries. For curiosity/scientific discovery and practical application, the variations across countries are minor, but researchers in Denmark tend to view career progress as somewhat more important than researchers in the other countries.

Furthermore, as table 6 shows, women seem to view practical application and career progress as a more important motivation than men; these differences are also significant. Similar gender disparities have also been reported in a previous study (Zhang et al. 2021 ).

There are also some differences in motivation across the additional variables worth mentioning, as Table  7 shows. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there is a significant moderate negative correlation between age, position, and career progress. This means that the importance of career progress as a motivation seems to decrease with increased age or a move up the position hierarchy.

In the second part of the analysis, we relate motivation to research performance. We first investigate publications and productivity using the percentile groups. Here, we present the results we use using predicted probabilities because they are more easily interpretable than coefficient estimates. For the model with productivity percentile groups as the dependent variable, the estimates for career progress were negative when comparing the medium productivity group to the high productivity group and the medium productivity group to the low productivity group. This result indicates that the probability of being in the high and low productivity groups decreases compared to the medium productivity group as the value of career progress increases, which may point towards a curvilinear relationship between the variables. A similar pattern was also found in the model with the citation impact group as the dependent variable, although it was not as apparent.

As a result of this apparent curvilinear relationship, we included quadric terms for career progress in both models, and these were significant. Likelihood ratio tests also show that the models with quadric terms included have a significant better fit to the data. Furthermore, the AIC was also lower for these models compared to the initial models where quadric terms were not included (see Appendix Tables A5 – A7 ). Consequently, we base our results on these models, which can be found in Appendix Table A7 . Due to a low number of respondents in the low categories of the scientific curiosity/discovery variable, we also combined the first three values into one to include it as a variable in the regression analysis, which results in a reduced three-value variable for scientific curiosity/discovery.

Results– productivity percentile group

Using the productivity percentile group as the dependent variable, we find that the motivational aspects of practical application and career progress have a significant effect on the probability of being in the low, medium, or high productivity group but not curiosity/scientific discovery. In Figs.  2 and 3 , each line represents the probability of being in each group across the scale of each motivational aspect.

Predicted probability for being in each of the productivity groups according to the value on the ‘practical application’ variable

Predicted probability of being in the low and high productivity groups according to the value on the ‘progress in my career’ variable

Figure  2 shows that at low values of application, there are no significant differences between the probability of being in either of the groups. However, from around value 3 of application, the differences between the probability of being in each group increases, and these are also significant. As a result, we concluded that high scores on practical application is related to increased probability of being in the high productivity group.

In Fig.  3 , we excluded the medium productivity group from the figure because there are no significant differences between this group and the high and low productivity group. Nevertheless, we found significant differences between the low productivity and the high productivity group. Since we added a quadric term for career progress, the two lines in Fig.  3 have a curvilinear shape. Figure  3 shows that there are only significant differences between the probability of being in the low or high productivity group at mid and high values of career progress. In addition, the probability of being in the high productivity group is at its highest value at mid values of career progress. This indicates that being motivated by career progress increases the probability of being in the high productivity group but only up to a certain point before it begins to have a negative effect on the probability of being in this group.

We also included age and gender as variables in the model, and Figs.  4 and 5 show the results. Figure  4 shows that age especially impacts the probability of being in the high productivity and low productivity groups. The lowest age category (< 30–34 years) has the highest probability for being in the low productivity group, while from the mid age category (50 years and above), the probability is highest for being in the high productivity group. This means that increased age is related to an increased probability of high productivity. The variable controlling for the effect of funding also showed some significant results (see Appendix Table A7 ). The most relevant finding is that receiving competitive grants from external public sources had a very strong and significant positive effect on being in the high productivity group and a medium-sized significant negative effect on being in the low productivity group. This shows that receiving external funding in the form of competitive grants has a strong effect on productivity.

Predicted probability of being in each of the productivity groups according to age

Figure  5 shows that there is a difference between male and female respondents. For females, there are no differences in the probability of being in either of the groups, while males have a higher probability of being in the high productivity group compared to the medium and low productivity groups.

Results– citation impact group

For the citation impact group as the dependent variable, we found that career progress has a significant effect on the probability of being in the low citation impact group or the high citation group but not curiosity/scientific discovery or practical application. Figure  6 shows how the probability of being in the high citation impact group increases as the value on career progress increases and is higher than that of being in the low citation impact group, but only up to a certain point. This indicates that career progress increases the probability of being in the high citation impact group to some degree but that too high values are not beneficial for high citation impact. However, it should also be noted that the effect of career progress is weak and that it is difficult to conclude on how very low or very high values of career progress affect the probability of being in the two groups.

Predicted probability for being in each of the citation impact groups according to the value on the ‘progress in my career’ variable

We also included age and gender as variables in the model, and we found a similar pattern as in the model with productivity percentile group as the dependent variable. However, the relationship between the variables is weaker in this model with the citation impact group as the dependent variable. Figure  7 shows that the probability of being in the high citation impact group increases with age, but there is no significant difference between the probability of being in the high citation impact group and the medium citation impact group. We only see significant differences when each of these groups is compared to the low citation impact group. In addition, the increase in probability is more moderate in this model.

Predicted probability of being in each of the citation impact groups according to age

Figure  8 shows that there are differences between male and female respondents. Male respondents have a significant higher probability of being in the medium or high citation impact group compared to the low citation impact group, but there is no significant difference in the probability between the high and medium citation impact groups. For female respondents, there are no significant differences. Similarly, for age, the effect also seems to be more moderate in this model compared to the model with productivity percentile groups as the dependent variable. In addition, the effect of funding sources is more moderate on citation impact compared to productivity (see Appendix Table A7 ). Competitive grants from external public sources still have the most relevant effect, but the effect size and level of significance is lower than for the model where productivity groups are the dependent variable. Respondents who received a large amount of external funding through competitive grants are more likely to be highly cited, but the effect size is much smaller, and the result is only significant at p  < 0.1. Those who do not receive much funding from this source are more likely to be in the low impact group. Here, the effect size is large, and the coefficient is highly significant.

Predicted probability for being in each of the citation impact groups according to gender

Concluding discussion

This article aimed to explore researchers’ motivations and investigate the impact of motivation on research performance. By addressing these issues across several fields and countries, we provided new evidence on the motivation and performance of researchers.

Most researchers in our large-N survey found curiosity/scientific discovery to be a crucial motivational factor, with practical application being the second most supported aspect. Only a smaller number of respondents saw career progress as an important inspiration to conduct their research. This supports the notion that researchers are mainly motivated by core aspects of academic work such as curiosity, discoveries, and practical application of their knowledge and less so by personal gains (see Evans and Meyer 2003 ). Therefore, our results align with earlier research on motivation. In their interview study of scientists working at a government research institute in the UK, Jindal-Snape and Snape ( 2006 ) found that the scientists were typically motivated by the ability to conduct high quality, curiosity-driven research and de-motivated by the lack of feedback from management, difficulty in collaborating with colleagues, and constant review and change. Salaries, incentive schemes, and prospects for promotion were not considered a motivator for most scientists. Kivistö and colleagues ( 2017 ) also observed similar patterns in more recent survey data from Finnish academics.

As noted in the introduction, the issue of motivation has often been analysed in the literature using the intrinsic-extrinsic distinction. In our study, we have not applied these concepts directly. However, it is clear that the curiosity/scientific discovery item should be considered a type of intrinsic motivation, as it involves performing the activity for its inherent satisfaction. Moreover, the practical application item should probably be considered mainly intrinsic, as it involves creating a better society (for others) without primarily focusing on gains for oneself. The career progress item explicitly mentions personal gains such as position and higher salary and is, therefore, a type of extrinsic motivation. This means that our results support the notion that there are very strong elements of intrinsic motivation among researchers (Jindal-Snape and Snape 2006 ).

When analysing the three aspects of motivation, we found some differences. Physicists tend to view practical application as less important than researchers in the two other fields, while career progress was most emphasised by economists. Regarding country differences, our data suggest that career progress is most important for researchers in Denmark. Nevertheless, given the limited effect sizes, the overall picture is that motivational factors seem to be relatively similar regarding disciplinary and country dimensions.

Regarding gender aspects of motivation, our data show that women seem to view practical application and career progress as more important than men. One explanation for this could be the continued gender differences in academic careers, which tend to disadvantage women, thus creating a greater incentive for female scholars to focus on and be motivated by career progress aspects (Huang et al. 2020 ; Lerchenmueller and Sorenson 2018 ). Unsurprisingly, respondents’ age and academic position influenced the importance of different aspects of motivation, especially regarding career progress. Here, increased age and moving up the positional hierarchy are linked to a decrease in importance. This highlights that older academics and those in more senior positions drew more motivation from other sources that are not directly linked to their personal career gains. This can probably be explained by the academic career ladder plateauing at a certain point in time, as there are often no additional titles and very limited recognition beyond becoming a full professor. Finally, the type of funding that scholars received also had an influence on their productivity and, to a certain extent, citation impact.

Overall, there is little support that researchers across various fields and countries are very different when it comes to their motivation for conducting research. Rather, there seems to be a strong common core of academic motivation that varies mainly by gender and age/position. Rather than talking about researchers’ motivation per se, our study, therefore, suggests that one should talk about motivation across gender, at different stages of the career, and, to a certain degree, in different fields. Thus, motivation seems to be a multi-faceted construct, and the importance of different aspects of motivation vary between different groups.

In the second step of our analysis, we linked motivation to performance. Here, we focused on both scientific productivity and citation impact. Regarding the former, our data show that both practical application and career progress have a significant effect on productivity. The relationship between practical application aspects and productivity is linear, meaning that those who indicate that this aspect of motivation is very important to them have a higher probability of being in the high productivity group. The relationship between career aspects of motivation and productivity is curve linear, and we found only significant differences between the high and low productivity groups at mid and high values of the motivation scale. This indicates that being more motivated by career progress increases productivity but only to a certain extent before it starts having a detrimental effect. A common assumption has been that intrinsic motivation has a positive and instrumental effect and extrinsic motivation has a negative effect on the performance of scientists (Peng and Gao 2019 ; Ryan and Berbegal-Mirabent 2016 ). Our results do not generally support this, as motives related to career progress are positively linked with productivity only to a certain point. Possibly, this can be explained by the fact that the number of publications is often especially important in the context of recruitment and promotion (Langfeldt et al. 2021 ; Reymert et al. 2021 ). Thus, it will be beneficial from a scientific career perspective to have many publications when trying to get hired or promoted.

Regarding citation impact, our analysis highlights that only the career aspects of motivation have a significant effect. Similar to the results regarding productivity, being more motivated by career progress increases the probability of being in the high citation impact group, but only to a certain value when the difference stops being significant. It needs to be pointed out that the effect strength is weaker than in the analysis that focused on productivity. Thus, these results should be treated with greater caution.

Overall, our results shed light on some important aspects regarding the motivation of academics and how this translates into research performance. Regarding our first research question, it seems to be the case that there is not one type of motivation but rather different contextual mixes of motivational aspects that are strongly driven by gender and the academic position/age. We found only limited effects of research fields and even less pronounced country effects, suggesting that while situational, the mix of motivational aspects also has a common academic core that is less influenced by different national environments or disciplinary standards. Regarding our second research question, our results challenge the common assumption that intrinsic motivation has a positive effect and extrinsic motivation has a negative effect on the performance of scientists. Instead, we show that motives related to career are positively linked to productivity at least to a certain point. Our analysis regarding citation patterns achieved similar results. Combined with the finding regarding the importance of current academic position and age for specific patterns of motivation, it could be argued that the fact that the number of publications is often used as a measurement in recruitment and promotion makes academics that are more driven by career aspects publish more, as this is perceived as a necessary condition for success.

Our study has a clear focus on the research side of academic work. However, most academics do both teaching and research, which raises the question of how far our results can also inform our knowledge regarding the motivation for teaching. On the one hand, previous studies have highlighted that intrinsic motivation is also of high importance for the quality of teaching (see e.g. Wilkesmann and Lauer 2020 ), which fits well with our findings. At the same time, the literature also highlights persistent goal conflicts of academics (see e.g. Daumiller et al. 2020 ), given that extra time devoted to teaching often comes at the costs of publications and research. Given that other findings in the literature show that research performance continues to be of higher importance than teaching in academic hiring processes (Reymert et al. 2021 ), the interplay between research performance, teaching performance, and different types of motivation is most likely more complicated and demands further investigation.

While offering several relevant insights, our study still comes with certain limitations that must be considered. First, motivation is a complex construct. Thus, there are many ways one could operationalise it, and not one specific understanding so far seems to have emerged as best practice. Therefore, our approach to operationalisation and measurement should be seen as an addition to this broader field of measurement approaches, and we do not claim that this is the only sensible way of doing it. Second, we rely on self-reported survey data to measure the different aspects of motivation in our study. This means that aspects such as social desirability could influence how far academics claim to be motivated by certain aspects. For example, claiming to be mainly motivated by personal career gains may be considered a dubious motive among academics.

With respect to the bibliometric analyses, it is important to realise that we have lumped researchers into categories, thereby ‘smoothening’ the individual performances into group performances under the various variables. This has an effect that some extraordinary scores might have become invisible in our study, which might have been interesting to analyse separately, throwing light on the relationships we studied. However, breaking the material down to the lower level of analysis of individual researchers also comes with a limitation, namely that at the level of the individual academic, bibliometrics tend to become quite sensitive for the underlying numbers, which in itself is then hampered by the coverage of the database used, the publishing cultures in various countries and fields, and the age and position of the individuals. Therefore, the level of the individual academic has not been analysed in our study, how interesting and promising outcomes might have been. even though we acknowledge that such a study could yield interesting results.

Finally, our sample is drawn from northwestern European countries and a limited set of disciplines. We would argue that we have sufficient variation in countries and disciplines to make the results relevant for a broader audience context. While our results show rather small country or discipline differences, we are aware that there might be country- or discipline-specific effects that we cannot capture due to the sampling approach we used. Moreover, as we had to balance sufficient variation in framework conditions with the comparability of cases, the geographical generalisation of our results has limitations.

This article investigated what motivates researchers across different research fields and countries and how this motivation influences their research performance. The analysis showed that the researchers are mainly motivated by scientific curiosity and practical application and less so by career considerations. Furthermore, the analysis shows that researchers driven by practical application aspects of motivation have a higher probability of high productivity. Being driven by career considerations also increases productivity but only to a certain extent before it starts having a detrimental effect.

The article is based on a large-N survey of economists, cardiologists, and physicists in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK. Building on this study, future research should expand the scope and study the relationship between motivation and productivity as well as citation impact in a broader disciplinary and geographical context. In addition, we encourage studies that develop and validate our measurement and operationalisation of aspects of researchers’ motivation.

Finally, a long-term panel study design that follows respondents throughout their academic careers and investigates how far their motivational patterns shift over time would allow for more fine-grained analysis and thereby a richer understanding of the important relationship between motivation and performance in academia.

Data availability

The data set for this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the R-QUEST team for input and comments to the paper.

The authors disclosed the receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Research Council Norway (RCN) [grant number 256223] (R-QUEST).

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Silje Marie Svartefoss

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Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Økernveien 9, 0608, Oslo, Norway

Silje Marie Svartefoss & Dag W. Aksnes

Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, 0315, Oslo, Norway

Jens Jungblut & Kristoffer Kolltveit

Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, 2311, Leiden, The Netherlands

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Silje Marie Svartefoss, Jens Jungblut, Dag W. Aksnes, Kristoffer Kolltveit, and Thed van Leeuwen. The first draft of the manuscript was written by all authors in collaboration, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Svartefoss, S.M., Jungblut, J., Aksnes, D.W. et al. Explaining research performance: investigating the importance of motivation. SN Soc Sci 4 , 105 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-024-00895-9

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The enablers of adaptation: A systematic review

• Tia Brullo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1293-3257 1 ,
• Jon Barnett   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0862-0808 1 ,
• Elissa Waters 2 &
• Sarah Boulter 3  

npj Climate Action volume  3 , Article number:  40 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Climate-change adaptation
• Climate-change policy

Knowledge of the practice of climate change adaptation is slowly shifting from a focus on barriers and limits to an understanding of its enablers. Here we take stock of the knowledge on the enablers of adaptation through a systematic review of the literature. Our review of empirical articles explaining how adaptation is enabled finds that there is a tendency in the literature to focus on local-scale case studies. Across all studies, some factors seem to be more important than others, including resources (particularly money), awareness of climate risks and responses, leadership, bridging and bonding social capital, and the support of higher-level institutions. Our analysis also highlights significant gaps in knowledge about enablers, including those that affect change in regional/provincial and national governments, in the private sector, and in non-local not-for-profit and non-governmental organisations.

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Introduction.

Over the past two decades, considerable effort has been devoted to identifying the barriers to climate change adaptation, with the intention of overcoming the impediments to institutional changes that reduce vulnerability 1 , 2 , 3 . Less prominent, but of growing importance, is research that explores the factors that create and promote opportunities for adaptation action 4 . The published research on these “enablers” of climate change adaptation has grown in recent years 5 , 6 . In this paper, we present the results of a systematic review of the literature on the enablers of climate change adaptation in human systems. We focus on empirical studies that identify factors that enabled the implementation of adaptation to reduce the vulnerability of people and social systems. This review seeks to understand how adaptation practitioners might positively influence the adaptation cycle, to understand the scope of current empirical literature and to identify gaps in existing knowledge on enabling adaptation.

Search Criteria

We conducted a systematic search of the Scopus database for peer reviewed literature on enablers of climate change adaptation. The purpose of this review was to analyse the existing knowledge of factors shown to enable climate change adaptation, identifying key trends and gaps that have emerged in recent years. A process of trial and error was used to identify the most appropriate search terms, which are shown in Table 1 .

The key search terms used for this review are applicable to a variety of other contexts where searching title, abstract, and key words returned over 27,000 results, hence these terms were searched in title-only to help limit results to the most relevant. This reflects the sparse and diverse literature on adaptation and the challenges of using systematic approaches in adaptation research 7 and demonstrates a limitation of our search. Nonetheless, a systematic approach was helpful in ensuring our review was transparent and replicable.

The search was conducted in February 2023 and was limited to literature from 2013 to 2023 (inclusive). Most literature on adaptation has been produced within the past fifteen years, such that limiting this search to the past ten years only eliminated 10% of the search results. Earlier literature does introduce the idea of the enablers of climate change adaptation and its theoretical underpinnings, however limiting our search by year helped to ensure the results we reviewed draw on more recent empirical understandings of adaptation and illustrate the current state of knowledge.

Using the filters provided within Scopus, we screened the results by removing keywords related to ‘autonomous’ adaptations within biophysical systems and non-human species, such as ‘genetics’ ‘phylogeny’ ‘acclimation’ or ‘nonhuman’, which are beyond the scope of this study’s focus. With these filters applied, and removing corrections and commentaries, the search produced 320 papers for further review (see Fig. 1 for the selection process as per the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines 8 ).

An outline of the systematic review approach that resulted in a total of 144 papers matching inclusion criteria, reported using the PRISMA guidelines 8 .

The titles, keywords, and abstracts for the remaining 320 papers were then screened for eligibility against our criteria for empirical papers that identified enablers, drivers or determinants of adaptation in human systems.

Rejected articles

At total of 202 search results were removed at screening and a further 176 papers were removed after initial review. This included: 114 papers that upon closer reading were not in any way about enablers of adaptation; 33 papers about adaptation in biological systems (see below); 20 papers that were about adaptive capacity and not adaptation practices per se; and 18 papers that were not empirical. We excluded papers that theorise about enablers or investigate adaptive capacity, given the recognition that there is often a significant gap between what is thought to cause adaptation and actual adaptation practice 9 .

Included articles

Over 100 of the papers matching our inclusion criteria investigated drivers or determinants of adaptation in agricultural households (or by agricultural landholders). To avoid skewing results through the experience of this particular sector and set of actors, we chose to review these papers separately and draw on several existing reviews which had previously analysed the findings and methods of these papers (drawn from the existing search results, see Fig. 1 ). The remaining 38 papers that were included describe the enablers of adaptation among various actors working at different scales and sectors, allowing for a clearer analysis of patterns in the research.

Coding and data extraction

The results were coded according to key criteria including research focus, case study location, scale of analysis, and methodology. Qualitative data on the key enablers, determinants or drivers identified in each paper was extracted, analysed, and grouped into common or reoccurring themes.

The literature predominantly consisted of empirical case studies investigating how to enable adaptation at a specific scale, and most often focussing on a specific type of actor (as opposed to networks of actors). Our analysis is therefore coded according to the actors whom the findings primarily apply to. This differentiation is important because it is not always straightforward: for example, Lawrence et al. explore local government adaptation to climate risk by taking into consideration the role of federal and regional governments 10 .

In some cases, articles employed mixed-method approaches to understand enablers of adaptation, which included literature reviews or reviews of adaptation policy in conjunction with empirical data. In these circumstances, the research team only extracted data based on empirical findings. This is similar to the approach of Berrang-Ford et al. who tested whether theorised determinants of adaptive capacity are associated with adaptation policy outcomes 11 .

Drivers of adaptation in agricultural households

Over 70% of the papers matching our inclusion criteria ( n  = 105) were investigating the drivers or determinants of adaptation decision-making or outcomes in agricultural households (or by agricultural landholders). Of these papers, 54% are case studies from the Sub-Saharan Africa region, and over 35% are case studies from across Asia (Fig. 2 ). This body of literature has been growing in recent years, with 4 papers published in 2013 and 23 papers published in 2022 (Fig. 3 ). These articles shared similar research approaches and had similar findings, as has been shown in four reviews of this literature 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 .

The geographic regions in which case studies were conducted, for the 105 articles looking at drivers or determinants of agricultural households’ adaptation decision-making, showing a concentration in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The number of papers per year, for the 105 articles looking at drivers or determinants of agricultural households’ adaptation decision-making, showing a gradual increase.

The review of the research on enablers of adaptation among agricultural households by Ajala and Chagwiza classifies the determinants of agricultural household adaptation into socio-economic and demographic factors (i.e. age, gender, literacy levels, household size, wealth), institutional factors (i.e. access to extension services, access to credit facilities, government policies), technological factors (i.e. information on climate, new farming technologies), socio-cultural factors (i.e. shared values) and cognitive factors (i.e. relationship with risk) 13 . Similarly, the review from García de Jalón and colleagues grouped drivers of adaptation into human capital, financial resources, infrastructure and technology, social interaction and governance, food security, dependence on agriculture, and attitudes towards the environment and climate change 14 . These enabling factors were echoed in the papers across Africa 12 , 15 and in other regions 16 .

The importance of knowledge and access to information was particularly emphasised in these studies, as was stakeholder engagement and participatory approaches for successful knowledge integration 12 , 15 . The importance of financial resources was also recognised across the studies: for example, Seidl et al.’s study of irrigators in Australia found financial capital to be the most statistically significant driver of adaptation actions 16 .

Trends in the empirical research from other actors

From here forward, our findings refer only to the 38 papers not focused on agriculture.

There were no clear trends in the date of publication of the 38 remaining articles: the most published in any given year was seven (in 2018), and the least was 2016 (1 paper). A large share (41.6%) of the studies were from journals Scopus categorised as primarily being in the field of environmental studies, such as Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability or Environmental Science and Policy , closely followed by those identified as being in the social sciences, such as Climate and Development (32.5%). The empirical case studies reviewed were predominantly reporting on cases in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and North America.

We grouped the enabling factors identified according to common or reoccurring themes, which are discussed in detail below. Figure 4 summarises the enabling factors identified in the literature according to the number of papers in which they were discussed and the main actors in each paper. It shows that there were a disproportionate number of studies focussing on local actors, be they local governments ( n  = 15) or local communities ( n  = 8). Studies of enablers applied to local communities and local governments both tended to emphasise the importance of leadership and social capital but made little mention of incentives or values.

In contrast, the literature provides little evidence about what enables adaptation at the level of individuals, in the private sector, in regional or provincial levels of government, and among national governments. Though there was mention of factors such as institutional support, risk perception, and trigger events, there was limited empirical evidence to justify that these were important enabling factors for these actors. Moreover, despite some insightful findings, there was no compelling evidence about the importance of some enabling factors, such as values and place attachment 17 , laws, and regulations 18 , or mainstreaming 19 .

Below we summarise the ten most mentioned enabling factors in the 38 articles reviewed (Fig. 4 ). These should not be read as definitive given the number of empirical papers is small and the absence of many studies beyond the local scale (Fig. 4 ), as is discussed further below.

a The number of references to different enabling factors and the actors those factors are primarily applied to (most papers refer to more than one enabler). b The total number of papers for each actor, ordered by scale.

Proactive Leaders

The idea of leadership was widely examined in this literature. In most cases, leadership referred to individuals who champion adaptation and who work to overcome barriers or create enabling conditions 4 , 20 , 21 , 22 . This enabler was particularly prominent in cases of adaptation in local communities and local governments (Fig. 4 ).

It is clear from the literature that government and private sector personnel who are committed, dedicated, and motivated to pursue adaptation in a professional capacity can play a significant role in enabling change 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 . Typically, these individuals understand the importance of climate change, are often involved in climate change research, and notice climate change impacts in their environment 25 , 27 . Such leaders often initiate change by putting in place adaptation policies, strategies and guiding documents, and ensuring these become normalised through their organisations 4 , 28 , 29 , 30 .

Local communities have also been shown to lead adaptation themselves through ‘bottom-up’ approaches 31 , which can achieve outcomes that are better suited to their local context 21 , 32 . Such efforts are even more effective when supported by leaders at higher levels 33 .

Sufficient resourcing

Much of the literature demonstrates the need for financial, human, and natural resources, as well as technology, to enable adaptation 4 , 10 , 20 , 23 , 28 , 34 , 35 . These factors were seen to be particularly important for local governments.

The importance of resources is self-evident, though the discussion tends to focus on the financial resources 23 , 33 , which perhaps reflects the emphasis placed on adaptation funding in the climate change regime, as well as the chronic problem of insufficient funding for local governments in most countries. The literature shows that because finance is so important, those who control its supply have disproportionate power in the adaptation process, often to the detriment of the priorities of lower-level stakeholders 32 , 34 , 36 . There is not only a tendency of donors to ignore local priorities (e.g. as presented by Westoby et al 32 .), but also for international donors to ignore national priorities 34 .

Resources are also shown to matter for the private sector, where actors are of course motivated to pursue climate change adaptation when it delivers economic benefits such as a reduction in costs, increased competitive advantage, or increasing property values 37 , though the literature regarding the private sector is small. The literature also fails to explore the influence of resources on the adaptation behaviour of individuals.

Some studies recognise that sufficient resourcing does not guarantee action on adaptation, let alone effective action. The study by Birchall and colleagues of regional governments reveals that although sufficient resources were guaranteed toward adaptation, conflicting priorities caused momentum to be lost before implementation was complete 28 . This suggests resources are best considered to be important among a larger set of conditions that contribute to an enabling environment for adaptation.

Adaptation knowledge

The literature often demonstrates that knowledge of climate risk and of possible adaptation responses is necessary to enable adaptation across almost all actors 21 , 33 , 37 , 38 , 39 . Considerable focus is placed on how knowledge is transferred into the adaptation process, including by engineers, consultants, extension services, and academics 4 , 10 , 27 . Training courses and other programs that develop the capacity of individuals working on climate change are considered important, as trained people are better equipped to find and handle the information necessary to make informed adaptation decisions 21 , 36 .

Coordination

Often mentioned in the literature about adaptation in governments, horizontal and vertical coordination between and within levels of government has been shown to enable consistent and efficient adaptation action 10 , 22 , 28 , 29 , 40 . The means of such coordination varies, as to be effective it should take into consideration factors including the physical environment, social structure, and local economy, and should be developed to fit the particular context 41 , 42 . In government, defining clear roles and responsibilities for different actors can allow lower levels of government to be more proactive, help share the risks of action and inaction, and promote knowledge sharing 10 , 22 , 29 , 30 , 36 . Conversely, the literature suggests that a lack of communication across levels of government can lead to poor planning decisions or maladaptation 22 .

Institutional support

The literature suggests that adaptation is enabled when the goals, policies and priorities of actors align to support those (leaders) who seek to implement adaptation. This was said to be most important at all levels of government (Fig. 4 ).

Shared goals, policies, and priorities give adaptation practitioners the independence necessary to progress adaptation, and the confidence that they are aligning with mandated priorities 25 , 26 , 28 . A well-integrated mandate for adaptation action within a governing body allows for a gradual increase in investment and capacity development 23 , 34 , 36 . It can also help to streamline the incorporation of adaptation across an organisation and incentivise policy actors to implement adaptation more actively and explicitly 26 , 36 . This is all, however, dependent on the support of elected officials, which in turn hinges on a mandate (or at least not popular opposition) for climate change adaptation. Political stability is also important as it creates a stable operating environment that gives governments the ability to make decisions and see them through 4 , 20 , 23 , 24 .

In Bowen et al.’s study of adaptation in the health sector in Cambodia, interviewees identified the formation of a National Climate Change Committee as the key change that enabled adaptation activities 34 . In this case, the Prime Minister was named Honorary Chair of the committee, which created significant buy-in from diverse actors and meant that higher levels of government had political incentives to commit to adaptation activities 34 .

Risk perception

The literature consistently shows that people, institutions, and organisations who perceive their climate risk to be high are most likely to take action to reduce their vulnerability 20 , 23 , 39 , 41 , 43 , 44 , 45 . Information that increases awareness of climate risks and a sense of urgency to responses can therefore help enable adaptation action 44 . There is also some evidence that those who know and understand the causes and consequences of climate change are more concerned about its potential effects, and so more likely to seek to implement change 38 . Understanding risk can lead to understanding that climate change can result in costly impacts, which can lead to financial arguments in favour of adaptation 4 , 41 , even in the absence of other external motivators 23 . Knowledge of effective adaptation measures can also overcome information barriers, and increase expectation of success, and in these ways helps enable adaptation actions 39 , 44 . Similar to financial resources, the influence of other external factors on these processes is important to consider, as is discussed below in trigger events .

Social capital (Networks)

The literature emphasizes the role of both bonding and bridging networks in enabling adaptation 4 , 21 , 32 , 46 . These social connections were most often discussed in relation to adaptation by local communities and local governments (Fig. 4 ).

Bonding social capital is shown to be important in building community resilience to climate shocks 46 , 47 , 48 . For example, community groups can be important in connecting vulnerable households to the resources and support they need to achieve sustainable adaptation 46 . Bonding social capital also helps foster collective action by increasing participation, cooperation, and problem solving 32 , 48 . Bridging social capital was shown to be important in systems of government, where networked individuals and organisations enable cooperation, knowledge sharing, and skill transfers that help promote adaptation 25 , 35 , 36 , 49 . Partnerships and networks can also help overcome human, financial, and knowledge resource barriers 25 .

Effective communication

Closely related to the issue of consultation or community participation (below), the literature also highlights the need for clear and accessible communication of climate risk and adaptation information in enabling adaptation decisions 10 , 20 , 33 , 38 , 45 , 47 . Communicating information helps to build a mandate for change, alleviate opposition to change, and allows stakeholders to participate and contribute purposefully to adaptation plans 33 , 41 , 42 , 50 .

Participation

Stakeholder participation as an enabler of adaptation is strongly tied to activities conducted by local governments (see Fig. 4 ), which likely reflects their role as key liaison to communities on new initiatives. The literature demonstrates that active engagement of stakeholders in decision-making processes (beyond more basic consultation processes) for adaptation policy and project development can promote the inclusion of different knowledges, perspectives, and experiences 10 , 26 , 32 , 42 , 50 . The evidence demonstrates that local people usually have the best understanding of the adaptation context, are best placed to anticipate and account for unintended effects of adaptation, and devise better responses 20 , 32 , 50 . Engagement can therefore improve the quality of decision-making processes, helping to assure the legitimacy and acceptance of adaptation amongst local communities 50 , or clarify the expectations and objectives of the private sector 37 . Participation in a collaborative and open adaptation process can also build capacity 34 , 35 .

Trigger events

Finally, the literature demonstrates that there are triggering events or windows of opportunity in which the environment is more favourable for the implementation of adaptation 20 , 25 , 27 , 30 . The influence of trigger events was particularly emphasised in reports of local-scale action 20 , 25 . Understanding their influence on private sector and national governments appears to be a significant gap in the literature (Fig. 4 ).

Certain events can trigger a change in the perception of climate risk and the need to adapt, and these most often include focussing events such as extreme weather and disasters but can also include other drivers such as Conferences of Parties to the UNFCCC, increases in funding, or energy crises 23 , 25 , 34 , 43 , 45 . The influence of trigger events is linked to risk perception and the tendency of people to distance themselves from climate risks over time 45 . The literature suggests that trigger events increase the salience and valence of climate risks, and so give leaders a stronger mandate to implement adaptation, innovation, and new communication strategies 4 , 45 . Whether these outcomes can be sustained during recurrent or increasingly severe climate events, political instability or other influential circumstances is, however, important to consider, though the literature reviewed here is not conclusive on this. While trigger events are therefore recognised as important for enabling adaptation, they are not sufficient by themselves 23 , and change is greatly enabled when pre-determined ideas and plans are able to be drawn on at short notice. For example, in their study of adaptation in local government in South Africa, Spires, and Shackleton explore how it was important for the momentum created by certain events to be used to drive the institutionalisation of adaptation and/or long-term interventions rather than allowing reactive responses 25 .

Other enabling factors

Adjacent to the idea of ‘risk perception’, several papers mention that experience with responding to climate variability can positively influence a community or person’s sense of self-efficacy and in turn its propensity to adapt 21 , 34 , 44 , 45 . For example, in their study of fishing communities in North-eastern USA, Maltby et al. note that the community’s historical experiences with adjusting to variability in fish stocks significantly influenced their ability to adapt to new challenges 21 . This suggests that experiential learning plays a role in enabling climate change adaptation and links to additional evidence that was not captured by this review, discussed below.

A number of other important enabling factors were identified in our review of the literature including mainstreaming: the practice of integrating adaptation policies and planning throughout government or business 42 , 51 , laws and regulations: which have the power to both enable and constrain adaptation 37 , 42 and environmental values: which can influence a person to be more amenable to supporting adaptation actions 38 , 39 . The evidence found in this review for these remaining enabling factors was sparse and not sufficient to draw any conclusions.

Interrogating the scope of the literature

It is possible that a proliferation of evidence about the enablers of adaptation comes from research at the local scale because this is where most action happens, which would be consistent with the common understanding that adaptation is a local issue that influences local populations and geographies and requires planning at the local level 4 , 22 , 50 , 52 . Nevertheless, this bias in evidence seems to miss more than it includes given it is also widely understood (and is confirmed by the studies reviewed here) that adaptation is enabled and more effective when it is a collective activity that works across scales and sectors. The relative lack of studies from higher scales and other sectors therefore suggests a need for much more research with non-local government actors, and with civil society and private actors at all scales. Indeed, there are surprisingly few studies focused on not-for-profit or non-government organisations beyond those rooted in local communities 32 . Similarly, it is important to consider the drivers or enablers of individual adaptation actions and the role they may play in generating demand for adaptation policies and projects from the government. It is very likely that more detail on factors enabling adaptation for these actors, as well as national governments, could be found in grey literature case studies which were not reviewed in this paper.

Limitations to our approach may also have influenced this evidence about the enablers of adaptation, and the distribution shown in Fig. 4 . In using Scopus we no doubt excluded articles from journals not listed in Scopus, which may explain the lack of literature from law, medical, or health journals. Thus it is likely that laws and regulations as enablers have been explained more than is been represented in our study. It is also possible that our use of keywords omitted some insights on enablers from environmental conservation and biological fields of study.

Given the overlap of research on adaptation with other disciplines, future work should seek to capture a wider body of literature from databases such as PubMed, and from those that better capture grey literature (such as Google Scholar). This is especially important for some fields such as law and health sciences which tend to have their own bespoke databases, and capture outputs produced by non-profit organisations, national governments, and the private sector. Alternate methodologies such as scoping review could also be used to identify relevant papers that use different language or keywords to discuss factors important to enabling adaptation, such as the paper by Porter et al. discussing the importance of high-level political support 53 or work on the importance of experiential learning by Baird et al. among others 54 , 55 . Finally, the link between adaptive capacity and actual adaptation implementation has not been well represented here and could be a focus of future investigations.

Considering barriers and enablers

As their counterpart, several papers take the approach of identifying enabling factors and barriers concurrently 20 , 25 , 30 , and enabling factors are sometimes posed as the opposite of the well-researched barriers to adaptation. While there is undoubtedly a strong correlation between enabling factors and barriers to adaptation, our review suggests that enabling factors are not independent of one another and may not directly remove barriers. Instead, the existing literature suggests that to promote adaptation a combination of enabling conditions must be facilitated to create an enabling environment. This was demonstrated, for example, by Birchall and colleagues highlighting the need for other enablers alongside financial resources 28 .

While our approach of grouping the literature helps to demonstrate that there are likely many combinations of associations between enabling factors and actors that mutually enable change, it was not able to fully capture these connections or highlight which factors are most influential, given the still small number of empirical studies from which to learn. These processes were explained well in two papers in particular 10 , 22 . Further work to translate this knowledge of enabling factors into a tangible and accessible resource of benefit to different actors would require frameworks or models that show how these sequencing of factors can affect change, as has been done extensively regarding barriers 5 , 6 or when developing decision making frameworks 56 .

Understanding of how adaptation is enabled is constrained by the relatively small number of empirical studies that explain actual instances of adaptation. Our review finds that some factors seem to be more important than others, including resources (and especially money), knowledge of climate risks and responses, leadership, social capital, and the support of institutions in which adaptation actors are nested. Together, the literature suggests that to promote adaptation a combination of different enabling factors is necessary to create an enabling environment amenable to change. These findings have explanatory power when applied to adaptation at local and household levels, which is the focus of much of the research. There is a need, however, for further research that can explain the factors and processes that enable adaptation in institutions that are not ‘local’, in regional/provincial and national governments, in the private sector, and non-local not-for profit and non-governmental organisations.

Data availability

The authors confirm that all data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

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We would like to acknowledge the financial support from the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Climate Systems Hub for conducting this review as part of the project Enabling Best Practice Adaptation .

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• Systematic Review
• Open access
• Published: 30 May 2024

Patient experiences: a qualitative systematic review of chemotherapy adherence

• Amineh Rashidi 1 ,
• Susma Thapa 1 ,
• Wasana Sandamali Kahawaththa Palliya Guruge 1 &
• Shubhpreet Kaur 1  

BMC Cancer volume  24 , Article number:  658 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Adherence to chemotherapy treatment is recognized as a crucial health concern, especially in managing cancer patients. Chemotherapy presents challenges for patients, as it can lead to potential side effects that may adversely affect their mobility and overall function. Patients may sometimes neglect to communicate these side effects to health professionals, which can impact treatment management and leave their unresolved needs unaddressed. However, there is limited understanding of how patients’ experiences contribute to improving adherence to chemotherapy treatment and the provision of appropriate support. Therefore, gaining insights into patients’ experiences is crucial for enhancing the accompaniment and support provided during chemotherapy.

This review synthesizes qualitative literature on chemotherapy adherence within the context of patients’ experiences. Data were collected from Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL, PsychINFO, Embase, Scopus, and the Cochrane Library, systematically searched from 2006 to 2023. Keywords and MeSH terms were utilized to identify relevant research published in English. Thirteen articles were included in this review. Five key themes were synthesized from the findings, including positive outlook, receiving support, side effects, concerns about efficacy, and unmet information needs. The review underscores the importance for healthcare providers, particularly nurses, to focus on providing comprehensive information about chemotherapy treatment to patients. Adopting recommended strategies may assist patients in clinical practice settings in enhancing adherence to chemotherapy treatment and improving health outcomes for individuals living with cancer.

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Introduction

Cancer can affect anyone and is recognized as a chronic disease characterized by abnormal cell multiplication in the body [ 1 ]. While cancer is prevalent worldwide, approximately 70% of cancer-related deaths occur in low- to middle-income nations [ 1 ]. Disparities in cancer outcomes are primarily attributed to variations in the accessibility of comprehensive diagnosis and treatment among countries [ 1 , 2 ]. Cancer treatment comes in various forms; however, chemotherapy is the most widely used approach [ 3 ]. Patients undergoing chemotherapy experience both disease-related and treatment-related adverse effects, significantly impacting their quality of life [ 4 ]. Despite these challenges, many cancer patients adhere to treatment in the hope of survival [ 5 ]. However, some studies have shown that concerns about treatment efficacy may hinder treatment adherence [ 6 ]. Adherence is defined as “the extent to which a person’s behaviour aligns with the recommendations of healthcare providers“ [ 7 ]. Additionally, treatment adherence is influenced by the information provided by healthcare professionals following a cancer diagnosis [ 8 ]. Patient experiences suggest that the decision to adhere to treatment is often influenced by personal factors, with family support playing a crucial role [ 8 ]. Furthermore, providing adequate information about chemotherapy, including its benefits and consequences, can help individuals living with cancer gain a better understanding of the advantages associated with adhering to chemotherapy treatment [ 9 ].

Recognizing the importance of adhering to chemotherapy treatment and understanding the impact of individual experiences of chemotherapy adherence would aid in identifying determinants of adherence and non-adherence that are modifiable through effective interventions [ 10 ]. Recently, systematic reviews have focused on experiences and adherence in breast cancer [ 11 ], self-management of chemotherapy in cancer patients [ 12 ], and the influence of medication side effects on adherence [ 13 ]. However, these reviews were narrow in scope, and to date, no review has integrated the findings of qualitative studies designed to explore both positive and negative experiences regarding chemotherapy treatment adherence. This review aims to synthesize the qualitative literature on chemotherapy adherence within the context of patients’ experiences.

This review was conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute [ 14 ] guidelines for systemic review involving meta-aggregation. This review was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42021270459).

Search methods

The searches for peer reviewed publications in English from January 2006-September 2023 were conducted by using keywords, medical subject headings (MeSH) terms and Boolean operators ‘AND’ and ‘OR’, which are presented in the table in Appendix 1 . The searches were performed in a systematic manner in core databases such including Embase, Medline, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Scopus and the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI). The search strategy was developed from keywords and medical subject headings (MeSH) terms. Librarian’s support and advice were sought in forming of the search strategies.

Study selection and inclusion criteria

The systematic search was conducted on each database and all articles were exported to Endnote and duplicates records were removed. Then, title and abstract of the full text was screened by two independent reviewers against the inclusion criteria. For this review, populations were patients aged 18 and over with cancer, the phenomenon of interest was experiences on chemotherapy adherence and context was considered as hospitals, communities, rehabilitation centres, outpatient clinics, and residential aged care. All peer-reviewed qualitative study design were also considered for inclusion. Studies included in this review were classified as primary research, published in English since 2006, some intervention implemented to improve adherence to treatment. This review excluded any studies that related to with cancer and mental health condition, animal studies and grey literature.

Quality appraisal and data extraction

The JBI Qualitative Assessment and Review Instrument for qualitative studies was used to assess the methodological quality of the included studies, which was conducted by the primary and second reviewers independently. There was no disagreement between the reviews. The qualitative data on objectives, study population, context, study methods, and the phenomena of interest and findings form the included studies were extracted.

Data synthesis

The meta-aggregation approach was used to combine the results with similar meaning. The primary and secondary reviewers created categories based on the meanings and concept. These categories were supported by direct quotations from participants. The findings were assess based on three levels of evidence, including unequivocal, credible, and unsupported [ 15 , 16 ]. Findings with no quotation were not considered for synthesis in this review. The categories and findings were also discussed by the third and fourth reviewers until a consensus was reached. The review was approved by the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee (2021–02896).

Study inclusion

A total of 4145 records were identified through a systematic search. Duplicates ( n  = 647) were excluded. Two independent reviewers conducted screening process. The remaining articles ( n  = 3498) were examined for title and abstract screening. Then, the full text screening conducted, yielded 13 articles to be included in the final synthesis see Appendix 2 .

Methodological quality of included studies

All included qualitative studies scored between 7 and 9, which is displayed in Appendix 3 . The congruity between the research methodology and the research question or objectives, followed by applying appropriate data collection and data analysis were observed in all included studies. Only one study [ 17 ] indicated the researcher’s statement regarding cultural or theoretical perspectives. Three studies [ 18 , 19 , 20 ] identified the influence of the researcher on the research and vice-versa.

Characteristics of included studies

Most of studies conducted semi-structured and in-depth interviews, one study used narrative stories [ 19 ], one study used focus group discussion [ 21 ], and one study combined focus group and interview [ 22 ] to collect data. All studies conducted outpatient’s clinic, community, or hospital settings [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ]. The study characteristics presented in Appendix 4 .

Review findings

Eighteen findings were extracted and synthesised into five categories: positive outlook, support, side effects, concern about efficacy and unmet information needs.

Positive outlook

Five studies discussed the link between positivity and hope and chemotherapy adherence [ 19 , 20 , 23 , 27 , 28 ]. Five studies commented that feeling positive and avoid the negativity and worry could encourage people to adhere in their mindset chemotherapy: “ I think the main thing for me was just keeping a positive attitude and not worrying, not letting myself worry about it ” [ 20 ]. Participants also considered the positive thoughts as a coping mechanism, that would help them to adhere and complete chemotherapy: “ I’m just real positive on how everything is going. I’m confident in the chemo, and I’m hoping to get out of her soon ” [ 23 ]. Viewing chemotherapy as part of their treatment regimen and having awareness of negative consequences of non-adherence to chemotherapy encouraged them to adhere chemotherapy: “ If I do not take medicine, I do not think I will be able to live ” [ 28 ]. Adhering chemotherapy was described as a survivor tool which helped people to control cancer-related symptoms: “ it is what is going to restore me. If it wasn’t this treatment, maybe I wasn’t here talking to you. So, I have to focus in what he is going to give me, life !” [ 27 ]. Similarly, people accepted the medical facts and prevent their life from worsening; “ without the treatment, it goes the wrong way. It is hard, but I have accepted it from the beginning, yes. This is how it is. I cannot do anything about it. Just have to accept it ” [ 19 ].

Finding from six studies contributed to this category [ 20 , 21 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 29 ]. Providing support from families and friends most important to the people. Receiving support from family members enhanced a sense responsibility towards their families, as they believed to survive for their family even if suffered: “ yes, I just thought that if something comes back again and I say no, then I have to look my family and friends in the eye and say I could have prevented it, perhaps. Now, if something comes back again, I can say I did everything I could. Cancer is bad enough without someone saying: It’s your own fault!!” [ 29 ]. Also, emotional support from family was described as important in helping and meeting their needs, and through facilitation helped people to adhere chemotherapy: “ people who genuinely mean the support that they’re giving […] just the pure joy on my daughter’s face for helping me. she was there day and night for me if I needed it, and that I think is the main thing not to have someone begrudgingly looking after you ” [ 20 ]. Another study discussed the role family, friends and social media as the best source of support during their treatment to adhere and continue “ I have tons of friends on Facebook, believe it or not, and it’s amazing how many people are supportive in that way, you know, just sending get-well wishes. I can’t imagine going through this like 10 years ago whenever stuff like that wasn’t around ” [ 23 ]. Receiving support from social workers was particularly helpful during chemotherapy in encouraging adherence to the chemotherapy: “ the social worker told me that love is courage. That was a huge encouragement, and I began to encourage myself ” [ 25 ].

Side effects

Findings from five studies informed this category [ 17 , 21 , 22 , 25 , 26 ]. Physical side effects were described by some as the most unpleasure experience: “ the side effects were very uncomfortable. I felt pain, fatigue, nausea, and dizziness that limited my daily activities. Sometimes, I was thinking about not keeping to my chemotherapy schedule due to those side effect ” [ 17 ]. The impact of side effects affected peoples’ ability to maintain their independence and self-care: “ I couldn’t walk because I didn’t have the energy, but I wouldn’t have dared to go out because the diarrhoea was so bad. Sometimes I couldn’t even get to the toilet; that’s very embarrassing because you feel like you’re a baby ” [ 26 ]. Some perceived that this resulted in being unable to perform independently: “ I was incredibly weak and then you still have to do things and you can’t manage it ” [ 22 ]. These side effect also decreased their quality of life “ I felt nauseated whenever I smelled food. I simply had no appetite when food was placed in front of me. I lost my sense of taste. Food had no taste anymore ” [ 25 ]. Although, the side effects impacted on patients´ leisure and free-time activities, they continued to undertake treatment: “ I had to give up doing the things I liked the most, such as going for walks or going to the beach. Routines, daily life in general were affected ” [ 21 ].

Concern about efficacy

Findings form four studies informed this category [ 17 , 18 , 24 , 28 ]. Although being concerned about the efficacy of the chemotherapy and whether or not chemotherapy treatment would be successful, one participant who undertook treatment described: “the efficacy is not so great. It is said to expect about 10% improvement, but I assume that it declines over time ” [ 28 ]. People were worried that such treatment could not cure their cancer and that their body suffered more due to the disease: “ I was really worried about my treatment effectiveness, and I will die shortly ” [ 17 ]. There were doubts expressed about remaining the cancer in the body after chemotherapy: “ there’s always sort of hidden worries in there that whilst they’re not actually taking the tumour away, then you’re wondering whether it’s getting bigger or what’s happening to it, whether it’s spreading or whatever, you know ” [ 24 ]. Uncertainty around the outcome of such treatment, or whether recovering from cancer or not was described as: “it makes you feel confused. You don’t know whether you are going to get better or else whether the illness is going to drag along further” [ 18 ].

Unmet information needs

Five studies contributed to this category [ 17 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 26 ]. The need for adequate information to assimilate information and provide more clarity when discussing complex information were described. Providing information from clinicians was described as minimal: “they explain everything to you and show you the statistics, then you’re supposed to take it all on-board. You could probably go a little bit slower with the different kinds of chemo and grappling with these statistics” [ 26 ]. People also used the internet search to gain information about their cancer or treatments, “I’ve done it (consult google), but I stopped right away because there’s so much information and you don’t know whether it’s true or not ” [ 21 ]. The need to receive from their clinicians to obtain clearer information was described as” I look a lot of stuff up online because it is not explained to me by the team here at the hospital ” [ 23 ]. Feeling overwhelmed with the volume of information could inhibit people to gain a better understanding of chemotherapy treatment and its relevant information: “ you don’t absorb everything that’s being said and an awful lot of information is given to you ” [ 22 ]. People stated that the need to know more information about their cancer, as they were never dared to ask from their clinicians: “ I am a low educated person and come from a rural area; I just follow the doctor’s advice for my health, and I do not dare to ask anything” [ 17 ].

The purpose of this review was to explore patient’s experiences about the chemotherapy adherence. After finalizing the searches, thirteen papers were included in this review that met the inclusion criteria.

The findings of the present review suggest that social support is a crucial element in people’s positive experiences of adhering to chemotherapy. Such support can lead to positive outcomes by providing consistent and timely assistance from family members or healthcare professionals, who play vital roles in maintaining chemotherapy adherence [ 30 ]. Consistent with our study, previous research has highlighted the significant role of family members in offering emotional and physical support, which helps individuals cope better with chemotherapy treatment [ 31 , 32 ]. However, while receiving support from family members reinforces individuals’ sense of responsibility in managing their treatment and their family, it also instils a desire to survive cancer and undergo chemotherapy. One study found that assuming self-responsibility empowers patients undergoing chemotherapy, as they feel a sense of control over their therapy and are less dependent on family members or healthcare professionals [ 33 ]. A qualitative systematic review reported that support from family members enables patients to become more proactive and effective in adhering to their treatment plan [ 34 ]. This review highlights the importance of maintaining a positive outlook and rational beliefs as essential components of chemotherapy adherence. Positive thinking helps individuals recognize their role in chemotherapy treatment and cope more effectively with their illness by accepting it as part of their treatment regimen and viewing it as a tool for survival. This finding is supported by previous studies indicating that positivity and positive affirmations play critical roles in helping individuals adapt to their reality and construct attitudes conducive to chemotherapy adherence [ 35 , 36 ]. Similarly, maintaining a positive mindset can foster more favourable thoughts regarding chemotherapy adherence, ultimately enhancing adherence and overall well-being [ 37 ].

This review identified side effects as a significant negative aspect of the chemotherapy experience, with individuals expressing concerns about how these side effects affected their ability to perform personal self-care tasks and maintain independent living in their daily lives. Previous studies have shown that participants with a history of chemotherapy drug side effects were less likely to adhere to their treatment regimen due to worsening symptoms, which increased the burden of medication side effects [ 38 , 39 ]. For instance, cancer patients who experienced minimal side effects from chemotherapy were at least 3.5 times more likely to adhere to their treatment plan compared to those who experienced side effects [ 40 ]. Despite experiencing side effects, patients were generally willing to accept and adhere to their treatment program, although one study in this review indicated that side effects made some patients unable to maintain treatment adherence. Side effects also decreased quality of life and imposed restrictions on lifestyle, as seen in another study where adverse effects limited individuals in fulfilling daily commitments and returning to normal levels of functioning [ 41 ]. Additionally, unmet needs regarding information on patients’ needs and expectations were common. Healthcare professionals were considered the most important source of information, followed by consultation with the internet. Providing information from healthcare professionals, particularly nurses, can support patients effectively and reinforce treatment adherence [ 42 , 43 ]. Chemotherapy patients often preferred to base their decisions on the recommendations of their care providers and required adequate information retention. Related studies have highlighted that unmet needs among cancer patients are known factors associated with chemotherapy adherence, emphasizing the importance of providing precise information and delivering it by healthcare professionals to improve adherence [ 44 , 45 ]. Doubts about the efficacy of chemotherapy treatment, as the disease may remain latent, were considered negative experiences. Despite these doubts, patients continued their treatment, echoing findings from a study where doubts regarding efficacy were identified as a main concern for chemotherapy adherence. Further research is needed to understand how doubts about treatment efficacy can still encourage patients to adhere to chemotherapy treatment.

Strengths and limitation

The strength of this review lies in its comprehensive search strategy across databases to select appropriate articles. Additionally, the use of JBI guidelines provided a comprehensive and rigorous methodological approach in conducting this review. However, the exclusion of non-English studies, quantitative studies, and studies involving adolescents and children may limit the generalizability of the findings. Furthermore, this review focuses solely on chemotherapy treatment and does not encompass other types of cancer treatment.

Conclusion and practical implications

Based on the discussion of the findings, it is evident that maintaining a positive mentality and receiving social support can enhance chemotherapy adherence. Conversely, experiencing treatment side effects, concerns about efficacy, and unmet information needs may lead to lower adherence. These findings present an opportunity for healthcare professionals, particularly nurses, to develop standardized approaches aimed at facilitating chemotherapy treatment adherence, with a focus on providing comprehensive information. By assessing patients’ needs, healthcare professionals can tailor approaches to promote chemotherapy adherence and improve the survival rates of people living with cancer. Raising awareness and providing education about cancer and chemotherapy treatment can enhance patients’ understanding of the disease and its treatment options. Utilizing videos and reading materials in outpatient clinics and pharmacy settings can broaden the reach of educational efforts. Policy makers and healthcare providers can collaborate to develop sustainable patient education models to optimize patient outcomes in the context of cancer care. A deeper understanding of individual processes related to chemotherapy adherence is necessary to plan the implementation of interventions effectively. Further research examining the experiences of both adherent and non-adherent patients is essential to gain a comprehensive understanding of this topic.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. on our submission system as well.

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Gassmann C, Kolbe N, Brenner A. Experiences and coping strategies of oncology patients undergoing oral chemotherapy: first steps of a grounded theory study. Eur J Oncol Nurs. 2016;23:106–14.

Tang GX, Yan PP, Yan CL, Fu B, Zhu SJ, Zhou LQ, et al. Determinants of suicidal ideation in gynecological cancer patients. Psycho-oncology. 2016;25(1):97–103.

Oven Ustaalioglu B, Acar E, Caliskan M. The predictive factors for perceived social support among cancer patients and caregiver burden of their family caregivers in Turkish population. Int J Psychiatry Clin Pract. 2018;22(1):63–9.

Levkovich I, Cohen M, Karkabi K. The experience of fatigue in breast Cancer patients 1–12 Month Post-chemotherapy: a qualitative study. Behav Med. 2019;45(1):7–18.

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First author (AR) and second author (ST) conceived the review and the second author oversight for all stages of the review provided by the second author. All authors (AR), (ST), (WG) and (SK) undertook the literature search. Data extraction, screening the included papers and quality appraisal were undertaken by all authors (AR), (ST), (WG) and (SK). First and second authors (AR) and (ST) analysed the data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript and revised the manuscript and all authors (AR), (ST), (WG) and (SK) approved the final version of the manuscript.

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The review was approved by the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee (2021–02896). A proposal for the systematic review was assessed by the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee and deemed not appropriate for full ethical review. However, a Data Management Plan (2021-02896-RASHIDI) was approved and monitored as part of this procedure. Raw data was extracted from the published manuscripts and authors could not identify individual participants during or after this process.

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Rashidi, A., Thapa, S., Kahawaththa Palliya Guruge, W. et al. Patient experiences: a qualitative systematic review of chemotherapy adherence. BMC Cancer 24 , 658 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-024-12353-z

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Current Literature

June 4, 2024

Study Examines Population-Level, Within-Hospital Disparities in Surgical Care

De Jager E, Osman S, Shen C, et al. Identifying Population-Level and Within-Hospital Disparities in Surgical Care . J Am Coll Surg . 2024, in press.

There is a lack of consensus on how to confirm population-level and hospital-level disparities in surgical care. This article used data from the ACS National Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) to detect disparities in surgical outcomes according to the Area Deprivation Index, which is a measure of socioeconomic status in a community/neighborhood, race, and ethnicity.

Outcomes of interest included inpatient mortality, urgent readmission, surgical site infection, colectomy mortality, and spine surgery complications. Data on more than 4 million patients were included.

The analysis showed that population-level disparities were defined by ADI; these were consistent after statistical adjustments. After adjustment for patient risk factors, disparities were identified in 1.1% of hospitals. The authors noted that these findings were probably influenced by sample size variations among healthcare facilities and the fact that NSQIP hospitals tend to be larger academic centers; low-income patients and black patients are more likely to be treated in smaller hospitals with limited resources.

Additional research to identify and quantify surgical care disparities at the hospital level is needed.

Active Surveillance Is Safe, Effective for Patients with Low-Risk Papillary Thyroid Cancer

Levyn H, Scholfield DW, Eagan A, et al. Outcomes of Conversion Surgery for Patients With Low-Risk Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma . JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg . 2024.

Ho AS, Davies L, Yeh MW. Active Surveillance and Conversion Surgery for Low-Risk Thyroid Cancer-The Disconnect Between Literature and Practice . JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg . 2024.

Active surveillance (AS) of patients with low-risk papillary thyroid cancer with conversion surgery performed if progression of disease is detected is a practice introduced in the mid-1990s; however, surgical and oncologic outcomes of conversion surgery have not been well documented.

This article reported outcomes from a patient cohort ( n = 550) containing three comparison groups of patients: those who underwent conversion surgery because of disease progression, those who underwent conversion surgery without evidence of disease progression, and those who underwent immediate thyroidectomy. Propensity scoring was used to match patient characteristics.

The data analysis showed that the overall 5-year survival was 100% in all groups. Although the conversion surgery group had higher risk for aggressive tumor behavior, the rates of regional recurrence (5.1%), local recurrence (0%), and distant metastasis (0%) were similar in all groups.

The authors concluded that AS was a safe and effective approach for patients with low-risk papillary thyroid cancer.

In the editorial that accompanied the article, Ho noted that adoption of AS among surgeons in the US has been slow, in part because of perceived malpractice risk associated with this approach.

Bariatric Surgery May Reduce Risk of Breast Cancer in Obese Patients

Kristensson FM, Andersson-Assarsson JC, Peltonen M,  et al. Breast Cancer Risk After Bariatric Surgery and Influence of Insulin Levels: A Nonrandomized Controlled Trial . JAMA Surg . 2024

Kulkarni SA, Sterbling HM. Bariatric Surgery Reduces Breast Cancer Incidence in a Prospective Trial . JAMA Surg . 2024.

Kristensson and coauthors reported data from a prospective randomized trial conducted in Sweden. They compared rates of breast cancer at more than 20 years after a bariatric surgery procedure ( n = 1,420) with patients treated for obesity ( n = 1,447) with non-operative measures.

The data showed that there was a significant reduction in risk for breast cancer in patients who underwent bariatric surgery. The risk reduction was most pronounced in patients with elevated baseline levels of insulin.

The authors concluded that bariatric surgery was associated with reduced incidence of breast cancer in obese patients.

In the editorial that accompanied the article, Kulkarni and Sterbling noted that it is not known whether hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance are true markers of increased breast cancer risk. They also emphasized that data adjusted for patient age were not reported. Other factors that may influence breast cancer risk in this patient group include estrogen levels, inflammatory markers, and types of bariatric surgery. These data support recognition of another important benefit of bariatric surgery in obese women.

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Writing, reading, and critiquing reviews

Écrire, lire et revue critique, douglas archibald.

1 University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada;

Maria Athina Martimianakis

2 University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Why reviews matter

What do all authors of the CMEJ have in common? For that matter what do all health professions education scholars have in common? We all engage with literature. When you have an idea or question the first thing you do is find out what has been published on the topic of interest. Literature reviews are foundational to any study. They describe what is known about given topic and lead us to identify a knowledge gap to study. All reviews require authors to be able accurately summarize, synthesize, interpret and even critique the research literature. 1 , 2 In fact, for this editorial we have had to review the literature on reviews . Knowledge and evidence are expanding in our field of health professions education at an ever increasing rate and so to help keep pace, well written reviews are essential. Though reviews may be difficult to write, they will always be read. In this editorial we survey the various forms review articles can take. As well we want to provide authors and reviewers at CMEJ with some guidance and resources to be able write and/or review a review article.

What are the types of reviews conducted in Health Professions Education?

Health professions education attracts scholars from across disciplines and professions. For this reason, there are numerous ways to conduct reviews and it is important to familiarize oneself with these different forms to be able to effectively situate your work and write a compelling rationale for choosing your review methodology. 1 , 2 To do this, authors must contend with an ever-increasing lexicon of review type articles. In 2009 Grant and colleagues conducted a typology of reviews to aid readers makes sense of the different review types, listing fourteen different ways of conducting reviews, not all of which are mutually exclusive. 3 Interestingly, in their typology they did not include narrative reviews which are often used by authors in health professions education. In Table 1 , we offer a short description of three common types of review articles submitted to CMEJ.

Three common types of review articles submitted to CMEJ

More recently, authors such as Greenhalgh 4 have drawn attention to the perceived hierarchy of systematic reviews over scoping and narrative reviews. Like Greenhalgh, 4 we argue that systematic reviews are not to be seen as the gold standard of all reviews. Instead, it is important to align the method of review to what the authors hope to achieve, and pursue the review rigorously, according to the tenets of the chosen review type. Sometimes it is helpful to read part of the literature on your topic before deciding on a methodology for organizing and assessing its usefulness. Importantly, whether you are conducting a review or reading reviews, appreciating the differences between different types of reviews can also help you weigh the author’s interpretation of their findings.

In the next section we summarize some general tips for conducting successful reviews.

How to write and review a review article

In 2016 David Cook wrote an editorial for Medical Education on tips for a great review article. 13 These tips are excellent suggestions for all types of articles you are considering to submit to the CMEJ. First, start with a clear question: focused or more general depending on the type of review you are conducting. Systematic reviews tend to address very focused questions often summarizing the evidence of your topic. Other types of reviews tend to have broader questions and are more exploratory in nature.

Following your question, choose an approach and plan your methods to match your question…just like you would for a research study. Fortunately, there are guidelines for many types of reviews. As Cook points out the most important consideration is to be sure that the methods you follow lead to a defensible answer to your review question. To help you prepare for a defensible answer there are many guides available. For systematic reviews consult PRISMA guidelines ; 13 for scoping reviews PRISMA-ScR ; 14 and SANRA 15 for narrative reviews. It is also important to explain to readers why you have chosen to conduct a review. You may be introducing a new way for addressing an old problem, drawing links across literatures, filling in gaps in our knowledge about a phenomenon or educational practice. Cook refers to this as setting the stage. Linking back to the literature is important. In systematic reviews for example, you must be clear in explaining how your review builds on existing literature and previous reviews. This is your opportunity to be critical. What are the gaps and limitations of previous reviews? So, how will your systematic review resolve the shortcomings of previous work? In other types of reviews, such as narrative reviews, its less about filling a specific knowledge gap, and more about generating new research topic areas, exposing blind spots in our thinking, or making creative new links across issues. Whatever, type of review paper you are working on, the next steps are ones that can be applied to any scholarly writing. Be clear and offer insight. What is your main message? A review is more than just listing studies or referencing literature on your topic. Lead your readers to a convincing message. Provide commentary and interpretation for the studies in your review that will help you to inform your conclusions. For systematic reviews, Cook’s final tip is most likely the most important– report completely. You need to explain all your methods and report enough detail that readers can verify the main findings of each study you review. The most common reasons CMEJ reviewers recommend to decline a review article is because authors do not follow these last tips. In these instances authors do not provide the readers with enough detail to substantiate their interpretations or the message is not clear. Our recommendation for writing a great review is to ensure you have followed the previous tips and to have colleagues read over your paper to ensure you have provided a clear, detailed description and interpretation.

Finally, we leave you with some resources to guide your review writing. 3 , 7 , 8 , 10 , 11 , 16 , 17 We look forward to seeing your future work. One thing is certain, a better appreciation of what different reviews provide to the field will contribute to more purposeful exploration of the literature and better manuscript writing in general.

In this issue we present many interesting and worthwhile papers, two of which are, in fact, reviews.

Major Contributions

A chance for reform: the environmental impact of travel for general surgery residency interviews by Fung et al. 18 estimated the CO 2 emissions associated with traveling for residency position interviews. Due to the high emissions levels (mean 1.82 tonnes per applicant), they called for the consideration of alternative options such as videoconference interviews.

Understanding community family medicine preceptors’ involvement in educational scholarship: perceptions, influencing factors and promising areas for action by Ward and team 19 identified barriers, enablers, and opportunities to grow educational scholarship at community-based teaching sites. They discovered a growing interest in educational scholarship among community-based family medicine preceptors and hope the identification of successful processes will be beneficial for other community-based Family Medicine preceptors.

Exploring the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical education: an international cross-sectional study of medical learners by Allison Brown and team 20 studied the impact of COVID-19 on medical learners around the world. There were different concerns depending on the levels of training, such as residents’ concerns with career timeline compared to trainees’ concerns with the quality of learning. Overall, the learners negatively perceived the disruption at all levels and geographic regions.

The impact of local health professions education grants: is it worth the investment? by Susan Humphrey-Murto and co-authors 21 considered factors that lead to the publication of studies supported by local medical education grants. They identified several factors associated with publication success, including previous oral or poster presentations. They hope their results will be valuable for Canadian centres with local grant programs.

Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical learner wellness: a needs assessment for the development of learner wellness interventions by Stephana Cherak and team 22 studied learner-wellness in various training environments disrupted by the pandemic. They reported a negative impact on learner wellness at all stages of training. Their results can benefit the development of future wellness interventions.

Program directors’ reflections on national policy change in medical education: insights on decision-making, accreditation, and the CanMEDS framework by Dore, Bogie, et al. 23 invited program directors to reflect on the introduction of the CanMEDS framework into Canadian postgraduate medical education programs. Their survey revealed that while program directors (PDs) recognized the necessity of the accreditation process, they did not feel they had a voice when the change occurred. The authors concluded that collaborations with PDs would lead to more successful outcomes.

Experiential learning, collaboration and reflection: key ingredients in longitudinal faculty development by Laura Farrell and team 24 stressed several elements for effective longitudinal faculty development (LFD) initiatives. They found that participants benefited from a supportive and collaborative environment while trying to learn a new skill or concept.

Brief Reports

The effect of COVID-19 on medical students’ education and wellbeing: a cross-sectional survey by Stephanie Thibaudeau and team 25 assessed the impact of COVID-19 on medical students. They reported an overall perceived negative impact, including increased depressive symptoms, increased anxiety, and reduced quality of education.

In Do PGY-1 residents in Emergency Medicine have enough experiences in resuscitations and other clinical procedures to meet the requirements of a Competence by Design curriculum? Meshkat and co-authors 26 recorded the number of adult medical resuscitations and clinical procedures completed by PGY1 Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Emergency Medicine residents to compare them to the Competence by Design requirements. Their study underscored the importance of monitoring collection against pre-set targets. They concluded that residency program curricula should be regularly reviewed to allow for adequate clinical experiences.

Rehearsal simulation for antenatal consults by Anita Cheng and team 27 studied whether rehearsal simulation for antenatal consults helped residents prepare for difficult conversations with parents expecting complications with their baby before birth. They found that while rehearsal simulation improved residents’ confidence and communication techniques, it did not prepare them for unexpected parent responses.

Review Papers and Meta-Analyses

Peer support programs in the fields of medicine and nursing: a systematic search and narrative review by Haykal and co-authors 28 described and evaluated peer support programs in the medical field published in the literature. They found numerous diverse programs and concluded that including a variety of delivery methods to meet the needs of all participants is a key aspect for future peer-support initiatives.

Towards competency-based medical education in addictions psychiatry: a systematic review by Bahji et al. 6 identified addiction interventions to build competency for psychiatry residents and fellows. They found that current psychiatry entrustable professional activities need to be better identified and evaluated to ensure sustained competence in addictions.

Six ways to get a grip on leveraging the expertise of Instructional Design and Technology professionals by Chen and Kleinheksel 29 provided ways to improve technology implementation by clarifying the role that Instructional Design and Technology professionals can play in technology initiatives and technology-enhanced learning. They concluded that a strong collaboration is to the benefit of both the learners and their future patients.

In his article, Seven ways to get a grip on running a successful promotions process, 30 Simon Field provided guidelines for maximizing opportunities for successful promotion experiences. His seven tips included creating a rubric for both self-assessment of likeliness of success and adjudication by the committee.

Six ways to get a grip on your first health education leadership role by Stasiuk and Scott 31 provided tips for considering a health education leadership position. They advised readers to be intentional and methodical in accepting or rejecting positions.

Re-examining the value proposition for Competency-Based Medical Education by Dagnone and team 32 described the excitement and controversy surrounding the implementation of competency-based medical education (CBME) by Canadian postgraduate training programs. They proposed observing which elements of CBME had a positive impact on various outcomes.

You Should Try This

In their work, Interprofessional culinary education workshops at the University of Saskatchewan, Lieffers et al. 33 described the implementation of interprofessional culinary education workshops that were designed to provide health professions students with an experiential and cooperative learning experience while learning about important topics in nutrition. They reported an enthusiastic response and cooperation among students from different health professional programs.

In their article, Physiotherapist-led musculoskeletal education: an innovative approach to teach medical students musculoskeletal assessment techniques, Boulila and team 34 described the implementation of physiotherapist-led workshops, whether the workshops increased medical students’ musculoskeletal knowledge, and if they increased confidence in assessment techniques.

Instagram as a virtual art display for medical students by Karly Pippitt and team 35 used social media as a platform for showcasing artwork done by first-year medical students. They described this shift to online learning due to COVID-19. Using Instagram was cost-saving and widely accessible. They intend to continue with both online and in-person displays in the future.

Adapting clinical skills volunteer patient recruitment and retention during COVID-19 by Nazerali-Maitland et al. 36 proposed a SLIM-COVID framework as a solution to the problem of dwindling volunteer patients due to COVID-19. Their framework is intended to provide actionable solutions to recruit and engage volunteers in a challenging environment.

In Quick Response codes for virtual learner evaluation of teaching and attendance monitoring, Roxana Mo and co-authors 37 used Quick Response (QR) codes to monitor attendance and obtain evaluations for virtual teaching sessions. They found QR codes valuable for quick and simple feedback that could be used for many educational applications.

In Creation and implementation of the Ottawa Handbook of Emergency Medicine Kaitlin Endres and team 38 described the creation of a handbook they made as an academic resource for medical students as they shift to clerkship. It includes relevant content encountered in Emergency Medicine. While they intended it for medical students, they also see its value for nurses, paramedics, and other medical professionals.

Commentary and Opinions

The alarming situation of medical student mental health by D’Eon and team 39 appealed to medical education leaders to respond to the high numbers of mental health concerns among medical students. They urged leaders to address the underlying problems, such as the excessive demands of the curriculum.

In the shadows: medical student clinical observerships and career exploration in the face of COVID-19 by Law and co-authors 40 offered potential solutions to replace in-person shadowing that has been disrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They hope the alternatives such as virtual shadowing will close the gap in learning caused by the pandemic.

Letters to the Editor

Canadian Federation of Medical Students' response to “ The alarming situation of medical student mental health” King et al. 41 on behalf of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students (CFMS) responded to the commentary by D’Eon and team 39 on medical students' mental health. King called upon the medical education community to join the CFMS in its commitment to improving medical student wellbeing.

Re: “Development of a medical education podcast in obstetrics and gynecology” 42 was written by Kirubarajan in response to the article by Development of a medical education podcast in obstetrics and gynecology by Black and team. 43 Kirubarajan applauded the development of the podcast to meet a need in medical education, and suggested potential future topics such as interventions to prevent learner burnout.

Response to “First year medical student experiences with a clinical skills seminar emphasizing sexual and gender minority population complexity” by Kumar and Hassan 44 acknowledged the previously published article by Biro et al. 45 that explored limitations in medical training for the LGBTQ2S community. However, Kumar and Hassen advocated for further progress and reform for medical training to address the health requirements for sexual and gender minorities.

In her letter, Journey to the unknown: road closed!, 46 Rosemary Pawliuk responded to the article, Journey into the unknown: considering the international medical graduate perspective on the road to Canadian residency during the COVID-19 pandemic, by Gutman et al. 47 Pawliuk agreed that international medical students (IMGs) do not have adequate formal representation when it comes to residency training decisions. Therefore, Pawliuk challenged health organizations to make changes to give a voice in decision-making to the organizations representing IMGs.

In Connections, 48 Sara Guzman created a digital painting to portray her approach to learning. Her image of a hand touching a neuron showed her desire to physically see and touch an active neuron in order to further understand the brain and its connections.

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How Art and Science Intersect

On this rebroadcast of The Pulse - We often think of art and science as existing in different — even opposite — spheres. One revolves around creativity and imagination; the other around observable facts and data — and never the twain shall meet. But really, art and science aren't as far apart as we might think. For centuries, artists have drawn on the natural sciences, and the wonders of the natural world, as inspiration for some of our most celebrated works. On this episode, we explore the hidden architecture of science that often underlies music, literature, and more. We talk with a mathematician who makes the case that math is key to appreciating literature on a whole new level; a pianist who reveals how the natural world inspired some of classical music's most iconic composers; and an artist whose work on water blurs the lines between art, ecology, and activism.