Much of the conversation about responsible research assessment has, understandably, focused on metrics: the over-reliance on journal impact factors, the misuse of citation counts, the distorting effect of ranking people by where they publish rather than by what they contribute. These are real problems, and reforming how research is measured is genuinely important. But there is a risk in framing the whole challenge as a debate about metrics, because it can make the task look smaller than it is. Replacing one set of numbers with another, or adding a narrative section to an application form, does not by itself change the culture of research — the web of incentives, behaviours, relationships and rewards that actually shapes how people do their work. This article looks at the broader project of reforming research culture, drawing on the responsible assessment domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
Why culture, not just metrics
Research culture is the environment in which research happens: how people are hired, promoted and rewarded; whether collaboration, mentorship and openness are valued or merely tolerated; whether the pressure to produce flashy results crowds out the slow, careful, reproducible work that good science depends on. Metrics are part of this culture, but only part. A system can adopt enlightened assessment criteria on paper while still, in practice, rewarding the same narrow behaviours, because the underlying incentives, expectations and norms have not shifted. Genuine reform means attending to the whole environment, not just the measurement layer on top of it. The metrics debate is the visible tip; the culture is the larger mass beneath.
Wellcome and the research-culture agenda
One of the organisations that has done most to widen this conversation is Wellcome, whose work on research culture has drawn attention to the lived experience of researchers and the pressures that shape it. Wellcome’s research-culture programme has highlighted that the environment in which research is conducted — the competitiveness, the precarity of careers, the toll on wellbeing — is itself a determinant of research quality and integrity. The insight is that you cannot reliably get good, honest, careful research out of a culture that rewards the opposite. By framing research culture as worthy of serious attention in its own right, this work has moved the conversation beyond the technicalities of assessment towards the human realities that assessment exists to serve.
The Hong Kong Principles
If the goal is to reward the behaviours that make research trustworthy, then assessment needs to be aligned with research integrity — and this is precisely what the Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers set out to do. The Hong Kong Principles propose that researchers should be assessed in ways that recognise and reward trustworthy research practices: responsible research conduct, transparent reporting that includes the full record rather than only positive results, open science, a diversity of contributions and roles, and the activities that build and sustain the research community. Their distinctive contribution is to connect assessment directly to integrity: instead of asking only “how productive or highly cited is this researcher?”, they ask “does this researcher do their work in a trustworthy, open and responsible way?” This reframes assessment as a lever for better behaviour, not merely a measurement exercise — if institutions reward the practices that make research reliable, they get more of them.
CoARA and institutional commitment
Principles need vehicles for action, and one of the most significant is the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). CoARA brings together organisations that commit to reforming research assessment, and crucially it asks them to make concrete commitments and to develop action plans for change within their own institutions. This institutional dimension is what distinguishes durable reform from good intentions. It is one thing for an individual to believe assessment should be broader and more responsible; it is another for a university or funder to commit publicly, develop a plan, and hold itself accountable for changing its own practices. By moving reform from the level of individual conviction to the level of institutional commitment, CoARA helps ensure that cultural change is embedded in how organisations actually operate, rather than remaining an aspiration that never reaches the committee rooms where decisions are made.
Recognising diverse contributions and reproducible work
A recurring theme across all of these efforts is the recognition of a broader range of contributions and the valuing of careful, reproducible practice. Several strands matter:
- Diverse contributions. Research depends on far more than first-author papers — on data and software, on mentorship, on peer review, on technical and supporting work, on building shared resources. A reformed culture finds ways to recognise these.
- Reproducibility. Valuing rigorous, transparent, reproducible work — rather than only novel or eye-catching results — is central to a healthier culture, because reproducibility is the foundation of reliable knowledge.
- Openness. Rewarding open practices — open data, open methods, open access — aligns incentives with the kind of transparent research the community says it wants.
From assessment to culture, and back
Assessment and culture are bound together. How we assess researchers signals what we value, and what we value shapes how people behave. The structured description of contributions plays a role here: when a person’s full range of contributions can be recorded and recognised — through frameworks such as the CRediT taxonomy and its set of contribution roles — it becomes possible to value more than the narrow signals that metrics capture. But the description is a means, not an end. The end is a research culture in which good, honest, open, careful, collaborative work is genuinely rewarded, and in which the people who do it can build sustainable careers.
A shared vocabulary for a shared reform
Reforming culture across many institutions requires a common language for what is being recognised and valued. Contribution types, assessment criteria and the elements of a researcher’s record must be described consistently, or reform in one place cannot be understood or built upon elsewhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary supports: a shared vocabulary for describing the contributions and activities that a reformed culture seeks to reward. The metrics debate opened the door; the larger work — the one Wellcome, the Hong Kong Principles and CoARA are pursuing — is changing the culture the metrics were only ever a symptom of.