The 2024-25 science budget of the UK is not enough: scientist’s frustration at Truss’s decision to resign

The finance minister of the UK, Jeremy Hunt, has said that the economic crisis won’t hurt ambitious plans for research spending.

Universities and scientists were concerned that the government might use funds promised for science to plug the multibillion-pound black hole in the country’s finances caused by interest-rate rises that resulted from budgeting decisions made by the previous prime minister, Liz Truss.

The Russell Group, which represents 24 leading UK research universities, had a big sigh of relief after learning the science budget would be protected.

Anne Johnson is the president of the Academy of Medical Sciences in London. But she warned that there could still be problems ahead for research. “Inflation will continue to put pressure on budgets in real terms, and we must protect collaborations between UK researchers and partners globally.”

Paul Nurse, the director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, said that the announcement was very good.

Although UK researchers have welcomed the clarity on spending, it is not clear who in Sunak’s government has ultimate responsibility for science. In October, Truss’s government announced that Nusrat Ghani would hold the post of science minister. Sunak kept her job, but also re-appointed George Freeman, who quit earlier this year in order to force then-prime minister Johnson to resign.

The 2024–25 commitment reaffirmed by Hunt is one milestone in an earlier pledge to spend 2.4% of gross domestic product on research and development by 2027. The government has already accomplished this, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. This is mainly because of changes in the way that research and development spending is calculated, rather than any cash boost.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), which oversees science spending, has two people listed asministers of state, one of which is also minister for science and investment security. A spokesperson for BEIS could not say who has overall responsibility for science, stating that the ministerial portfolios “are not formally confirmed”.

Nature Index: An online tool for understanding the progress of biomedical-science institutions during the last few years of the COVID-19 pandemic

The information on the terminology and methodology used in this supplement and a guide toFunctionality available for free online can be found at natureindex.com.

Over the past few years, the number (Count) of biomedical-sciences publications in the Nature Index has grown from a total of 16,000 in 2016 to 19,451 in 2021, a rise of 21.6%. The proportion of all Nature Index articles defined as being part of the field has also gone up, from 27.6% in 2016 to 28.4% in 2021. The global health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic took place in the last part of this period. The implications of this for biomedical research were huge, as scientists raced to understand the coronaviruses before a vaccine could be developed.

Adjusted Share accounts for the small annual variation in the total number of articles in the Nature Index journals. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.

The bilateral collaboration score is the amount of shares on the papers to which both institutions have contributed. It is possible for two institutions to collaborate on an article for the journal the Nature Index tracks.

In order to find out more information, it is possible to drill down to the most recent outputs from the profile page. Articles can be displayed by journal, and then by article. Research outputs are organized by subject area. The pages list the institution or country’s/territory’s top collaborators, as well as its relationship with other organizations. Users can track an institution’s performance over time, create their own indexes and export table data.

The country’s institutions dominated rising in share from the year 2015 to the year 2020, despite a smaller role for biomedical sciences in China’s overall research profile.

The share in the Nature Index in some of the leading countries changed dramatically over the first two years of the COVID-19 crisis. A number of nations saw a big rise in their share over the course of the next couple years, which may be related to their involvement in the early Pandemic research. Such a boost could have contributed to a percentage fall for some nations the following year, as research volumes fell back to levels closer to those seen in pre-pandemic times. Some nations such as China and Israel, which saw a rise in Share in 2021, while others such as India, which saw a decline in 2020, bounced back the following year.

Harvard University again features among the top academic–corporate biomedical partnerships in the Nature Index by bilateral collaboration score, but the top collaboration involves two Switzerland-based organizations, the University of Basel and international pharmaceutical company Novartis.

Yian Yin says that other research2 has suggested that scientific innovation has slowed in recent decades. But this study offers a “new start to a data-driven way to investigate how science changes”, he adds.

It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes, Walsh says. Changes in the scientific enterprise may be to blame for the trend. There are now more researchers and they have created a more competitive environment which has raised the stakes to publish their research and seek patents. The incentives for how researchers work have changed as a result of that. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

The authors also analysed the most common verbs used in manuscripts and found that whereas research in the 1950s was more likely to use words evoking creation or discovery such as, ‘produce’ or ‘determine’, that done in the 2010s was more likely to refer to incremental progress, using terms such as “improve’ or ‘enhance’.

“It’s great to see this [phenomenon] documented in such a meticulous manner,” says Dashun Wang, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies disruptiveness in science. “They look at this in 100 different ways, and I find it very convincing overall.”

Disruptiveness and science are not necessarily bad according to Wang. The first direct observation of gravitational waves, for example, was both revolutionary and the product of incremental science, he says.

The ideal is a healthy mix of incremental and disruptive research, says John Walsh, a specialist in science and technology policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He says that having more replication and reproduction is a good thing in a world that is concerned with validity.

Finding an explanation will be difficult, Walsh says. Between 1945 and 2010 the percentage of disruptive research dropped, but the number of highly-disruptive studies has not changed. The rate of decline is puzzling, as it happened steeply from 1945 to 1970 and slowly from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.

There is a gap between saying that you want to measure broad impacts and actually creating a system to do so. “The evaluation culture hasn’t hit science to the extent that it might,” says Paul Nightingale, a science-policy researcher at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. The government knows what its return on investment may be in terms of social and economic value with the money spent on road, education or welfare schemes. “In the UK, science is the only area of significant public funding where there isn’t proper impact evaluation.”

In 2016, the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (NAUAS) took a broad view of scientific contributions in a document called Onderzoek met Impact (Research with Impact) (see go.nature.com/3wtq3). The report outlined ten areas of society that university research should affect, including health and vitality, education and talent development, societal resilience, sustainable transportation, sustainable agriculture and responsible business. There was no methodology for actually tracking impact in the document, which underscored NAUAS’s interest in proving the worth of research.

Still, he says, collecting and categorizing policy citations will help to broaden the picture of research impact. Evidence of policy impact that databases can give for research is going to be more important than ever. “It provides a more holistic view of research contributions. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

At an even wider level, science has the potential to transform the planet by tackling global environmental crises, such as climate change, and to improve the well-being of poorer communities. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 targets that address the biggest global challenges, including poverty, hunger and clean energy, are increasingly being used to measure such impact.

Bornmann co-authored a 2020 study5 that examined altmetric scores — figures based on social-media posts, news mentions and Wikipedia entries, as gathered by the data company Altmetric — of about 200 researchers who applied for funding at the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability, an environmental research centre based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The study found only a weak correlation between altmetric scores and the likelihood of securing funding, a sign that the scores were a poor proxy of research quality.

If alternative metrics are ever going to be a reliable basis for funding decisions, then they need to be refined and verified, according to Bornmann. “There needs to be a longer period of research on these metrics, and then they can be used in evaluation,” he says.