Scientific Reward System

This learning resource is about the scientific reward system. To learn about some systemic drivers of scientific innovation beside the intrinsic motivation of scientist to solve problems and explore the unknown structures e.g. with an experimental design.

• Number scientific publications (impact factor of journals and publication in peer-reviewed journals)
• Number grants and amount of funding
• number of awards provided by institutions, organisations or governments in recognition of technical, social, cultural or scientific advances (e.g. the Nobel Prize).

Learning Task

This learning task is for scientists that want to step back and look at drivers for their own scientific innovation:

• How does the reward system influence your decisions to create proposal and form teams with other scientists?
• Compare interdisciplary teams (e.g. Medicine, Computer Science, Geographers, Physisist, Mathematics, ...) with teams of single discipline team applying for a grant in terms of workload and success rate for the proposal?
• How is the current scientifc reward system encouraging for the scientist and what are the challenges and obstacles in the scientific reward system?
• "If you want to walk fast walk alone, if you want to walk far walk together!". Would you agree or disagree with that statement and do you find evidence in the scientific reward system that encouraged scientific collaboration and how is that done?
• Write a short summary for yourself, about your future scientifc work!
• (Optimisation) Look at the concept of Minimum or Least Publishable Units as an approach
  • to maximise the reward for scientific innovation,
  • to decompose knowledge in smaller fraction, that can be reused and cited according to the fraction of the innovation.
  • workload to aggregate units of decomposed scientific results into main result discovered by the scientist.
• (Open Badges for Scientific Advancements) Assume Organisations like WHO would issue Open Badges to acknowledge scientific results that provide important advancements in the Health Domain. That might be applied for Sustainable Development Goals in general. Why will this form of acknowledge has some limitations to replace the Scientific Reward System mentioned above.