Improving research culture

Why research culture matters

Research culture describes the environment in which research happens. It's made up of expectations, values, attitudes and behaviours of the people within it. It shapes how research is created, stored and shared.

UCL is committed to building a positive research culture where research innovation and excellence can flourish, through attracting and retaining the best talent to sustain our research quality and research integrity. It is a priority area for universities and the next Research Excellence Framework (REF2029) exercise, and increasingly research funders are asking for evidence on improving research culture within grant applications.

At UCL, we want to create a research environment where we support one another to succeed. The Research Culture team at UCL have published a 10-year roadmap, and have been awarded funding by the Wellcome Trust’s Institutional Funding for Research Culture for a two-year programme of work around enabling collaboration and team science.

Applying behavioural science

Research culture is the product of numerous different actions performed by different actors at different levels of the research system, including students, researchers, professional services and funders. Research culture depends on how they communicate, collaborate, lead and manage. It expresses itself, and is shaped by, interdisciplinary work, open science practices, and levels of support and inclusivity. Therefore, improving research culture requires behaviour change. Before strategies can be developed to support and encourage this, we first need to define the problem in behavioural terms and identify the factors influencing these behaviours.

We are collaborating with the UCL Research Culture team and colleagues across UCL departments and external partner organisations, to apply behavioural science theories, frameworks, and methods to:

• define research culture in behavioural terms
• explore barriers and enablers to improving research culture, and 
• contribute to the development and evaluation of three novel interventions to be piloted by UCL Research Culture.