When research and sustainability are mentioned together, the conversation usually turns to carbon: the energy a laboratory consumes, the emissions of computing, the footprint of travel and equipment. These matter and deserve the attention they receive. But there is another kind of waste in research that is just as real and far less visible — the waste of research that is poorly designed, badly conducted, inadequately reported or never published. Effort, money, participants’ time and goodwill are all expended, yet the work yields little usable. Seen clearly, avoidable research waste is a sustainability problem: it squanders finite resources just as surely as energy waste does, and reducing it makes the research enterprise more responsible. This article looks at that argument and the frameworks behind it, drawing on the sustainable-research domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The waste in the research process
The case that a great deal of research effort is avoidably wasted was made influentially by Iain Chalmers and Paul Glasziou, who identified several stages at which waste creeps in. Their analysis pointed to waste arising when the wrong questions are asked — research that does not address what matters to those who would use it, or needlessly repeats what is known; when studies are poorly designed or conducted — methods that cannot give a reliable answer; when research is not published — results, especially negative ones, that disappear so others cannot learn from them; and when reporting is inadequate — studies described so incompletely they cannot be understood or replicated. The striking feature is that the waste is not in any single dramatic failure but distributed across the ordinary process of research, much of it avoidable with better practice. That is what makes it a sustainability concern: it is systemic, large, and within our power to reduce.
The REWARD campaign
This analysis gave rise to a sustained effort to address the problem, prominently the REWARD campaign (Reduce research Waste And Reward Diligence), launched through a series of papers in The Lancet. REWARD turned the diagnosis of waste into a programme for change, calling on the many actors in the research system — funders, institutions, regulators, journals and researchers — to take responsibility for reducing waste where each has influence. Its central message is that reducing waste is a shared responsibility distributed across the whole system, because the causes of waste are distributed too. A funder can insist on questions that matter; an institution can support good design; a journal can require complete reporting and publish sound studies regardless of their results. REWARD’s framing — reduce waste, reward diligence — reframes good methodological practice as the sustainable use of research resources.
Better reporting: the EQUATOR Network
One of the most tractable forms of waste is inadequate reporting, and here a concrete remedy exists. The EQUATOR Network (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) promotes the use of reporting guidelines — structured checklists of what a study of a given type should report so others can understand, appraise and use it. Different designs have their own guidelines, but the principle is constant: a study that is completely and transparently reported can be built upon, while one that omits crucial detail is, in effect, lost, however good the underlying work. Reporting guidelines combat waste by ensuring the value of a study is not thrown away at the final hurdle. They are a low-cost, high-return intervention: they ask not for more research but for research already done to be communicated well enough that it counts.
Better questions and designs: registered reports
Waste that arises earlier — from poor design, from selective publication, from questions chosen for their likely results rather than their importance — calls for interventions earlier in the process. Registered reports are one of the most promising. In this model, a study’s rationale and methods are peer-reviewed and accepted before the research is carried out and before the results are known. This attacks several sources of waste at once:
- It improves design. Reviewing the methods before data collection catches weaknesses while they can still be fixed, not after the effort has been spent.
- It combats publication bias. Because acceptance is based on the question and the method, the study is published whatever the results, so negative findings enter the record instead of vanishing.
- It rewards the right things. It values asking a good question and answering it rigorously over producing a striking result.
Registered reports embody the REWARD philosophy: get the question and the method right, and reward the diligence rather than the outcome.
Reproducibility as the unifying aim
Running through all of this is the concern with reproducibility. Research that cannot be reproduced — because it was poorly designed, incompletely reported, or never published — cannot be reliably built upon, and effort that cannot be built upon is, in the deepest sense, wasted. Better questions, sound methods, complete reporting and the publication of all results are the conditions under which research becomes reproducible and therefore cumulative. Framing this as sustainability is more than rhetoric: the resources poured into research — money, time, the participation of patients and volunteers — are precious, and wasting them through avoidable methodological failure is as much a sustainability failure as wasting energy. Reducing research waste makes the whole enterprise go further on what it is given.
A consistent vocabulary for sound research
For these practices to be tracked across funders, institutions and journals, the elements involved — study types, reporting standards, registration status, contribution roles — need to be described consistently. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so the information describing how research was designed, reported and shared is understood the same way wherever it is recorded. And because doing research diligently is a collective effort, the contributions behind sound work can be described in the same shared framework — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles, with further context at our learning hub. Sustainability in research is not only about the carbon it emits; it is also about not wasting the effort it embodies — and better methods are how that waste is reduced.