What is ‘Significant’ Anyway?
Exploring the Disconnections Between What Matters In Life and Research
What matters in life? What matters in research? Whether or not you’re interested in research, it is shaped and shaping our schools, how and what children are learning, our education systems. Where can we build bridges over the gulf between what is significant in research and life?
How significant are you anyway? You are one of 7.8 billion people on earth in an expanding cosmos, here with another breath to breathe, moments precious, each day waiting for you to fill with wonder. Only you can make each day count. If you feel overwhelmed, look at the stars and remember that it’s taken tens of thousands of years for their light to shine upon your eyes — how significant will your worries be in six weeks, six months, six or 60-years time? A great life is a series of great days. Being our best selves each day requires the tools of leading a good life: emotional resilience, compassion, relationship repair, curiosity, creativity, holistic health, connection and gratitude. Tombstone epitaphs aim to share the most important values of the deceased: beloved, loving, compassionate, joyful, generous, soldier, lover, writer, teacher, leader, daughter, son, mother, father, partner, friend.
What of significance did two decades of schooling equip me with?
- A foundational understanding in maths, science, English, a foreign language, some history, geography, a little art and IT = ways of developing cognitive knowledge appropriate for academic research.
- Ability to pass tests = extrinsic measures which serve as tickets to places that otherwise might not be accessible, including opportunities overseas.
- Friends = exposure and some time and space in which to engage with people beyond family.
- A free violin = an avenue to explore the potential of a world otherwise unavailable.
- Orchestra = an opportunity to be part of something which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and brings joy (or pain!) to others.
- Freedom to choose my own research = I was lucky with my university advisors
- Magical teachers = who care
What of significance did school not teach me?
- Communication tools for life ≠ there are simple tools and templates we can follow, it’s not a mystical art.
- Time and space to explore learning with hands, heart, and body ≠ you were lucky if once a week you got to dance or build something with your hands…. then switched out for another non-academic activity.
- Looking after what you’re putting in your body and mind. Garbage in = garbage out.
- Confidence to fail. Reflective practices help you figure out what to do next.
- Why I should study subjects ≠ I didn’t understand that studying pure maths could give me patterns of thought and logic that I could usefully apply in other areas of life.
- Gratitude.
- Financial literacy.
- Exposure to different life choices besides further education.
- How to rest present with my body and thoughts ≠ for many of us, our only experience of silence was in stressful exams or to “sit down and be quiet” when our body and mind were crying to be reconnected.
- The art and importance of loving oneself.
Having explored what is significant in life, let’s look at what matters in research.
Publications, Citations, Proteins
The primary output of academic research is peer-reviewed publication. Yet more than half of the 90 million+ papers in the Web of Science index have been cited only once, or not at all. Nature states that the most cited research is a 1951 paper on how to determine how much protein is in a solution, with over 300,000 citations. Google’s top-100 puts Laemmli’s 1971 research, also on protein, in the top spot. Whether or not your measure includes books or only journals, ‘protein’ is well-referenced, featuring in five of the top-30 most cited work of all time. Density function theory (a way of calculating the behaviour of a material’s electrons) features heavily too.
If citations are what you want, devising a method that makes it possible for people to do the experiments they want at all, or more easily, will get you a lot further than, say, discovering the secret of the Universe. Peter Moore, Yale University.
Counting citations alone is a rather crude measure so bibliometricians analyse the impact of research using various quantitative measures, including h-index (the number of an author’s publications (h) that have h or more citations to them), journal impact factor and field-weighted citation impact, which accounts for the fact that different subjects cite each other at different rates. For example, physicists cite each other less often than biologists.
Every current fuels its counter-current and some have critiqued the legitimacy of bibliometric measures as a means of professional research assessment. The rise of non-traditional bibliometrics recognises the many different ways that research is being talked about in the 21st century, including the number of news outlets that pick up an article, blog posts, social media engagement (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit) and reference management tools used by researchers.
Do the above methods of analysis pick up on research that goes viral as discredited? The impact of research is important in understanding its true significance.
Impact
Research done, published, cited and shared. So what? What purpose does it serve if it doesn’t lead to action?
Impact is defined as an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.
Impact includes, but is not limited to, an effect on, change or benefit to:
• the activity, attitude, awareness, behaviour, capacity, opportunity, performance, policy, practice, process or understanding
• of an audience, beneficiary, community, constituency, organisation or individuals
• in any geographic location whether locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. UK Research Excellence Framework, 2021
Impact can also include the prevention or reduction in negative effects, risk, or harm. Current practices assessing the impact of research look for evidence of cooperation or collaboration with local governments, organisations, public or private institutions. Policy change, patents, and start-up companies underpinned by the research findings also demonstrate impact.
Isn’t one element of significance an ability to stand the test of time? Gregor Mendel conducted experiments on pea plants for seven years and published three years after that. Would today’s methods of assessing his research result in cutting his funding, thus preventing his contribution to the modern science of genetics, recognised about three decades later? The outputs and impact of Galileo, Van Gogh, and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau remained largely unrecognised until after death, sometimes centuries later. Current measures of impact in the professional assessment of research tend towards short-termism.
What are the similarities and differences between significance in life and in research? In common is the importance of connection; the extent and quality of connections formed, whether in our personal life or through our contribution to the advancement of knowledge, is significant. One affects our happiness and well-being, the other affects our significance as a researcher. Gratitude is crucial; researchers thank those upon whose shoulders they stand by citing their work. On the other hand, while researching certainly demands emotional resilience, it is neither taught as a tool for conducting research, nor incentivised. Equally, compassion is conspicuously absent from research practice and assessment.
The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentives to expand and diversify my compassion. So I strive to understand the mysteries of the stock exchange, while making far less effort to understand the deep causes of suffering. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yet research now shows that compassion is significant especially in the healthcare sector. Compassion can lower post-traumatic stress disorder among patients with life-threatening medical emergencies, while empathy can reduce pain through touch. Compassion training exists for physicians and certain behaviours have been found to be effective:
1. sitting (versus standing) during the interview (with patient)
2. detecting patients’ non-verbal cues of emotion
3. recognizing and responding to opportunities for compassion
4. non-verbal communication of caring (e.g. eye contact) and
5. verbal statements of acknowledgement, validation, and support. These behaviors were found to improve patient perception of physician empathy and/or compassion.
Curricula for empathy and compassion training in medical education: A systematic review. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221412
Research demonstrates that compassion has impact in the medical field by changing physicians attitudes, activities, awareness, behaviour and opportunity. Why wait any longer to diversify, expand, and globalise compassion? Compassion must be explored and exercised both in the conducting of research and as a research pursuit. Compassion can and should be taught as a tool for leading a good life, together with the tools of emotional resilience, learning with heart, hands and body, curiosity, creativity, gratitude, and how to love oneself. These are not add-ons to an existing curriculum, the medium is the message. How can we teach compassion if we are not practising it ourselves? How can we preach the virtues of sustainability when we are not sustaining ourselves? We cannot continue to disconnect our learning or teaching self from the rest of our human bodily experience. We are whole human beings — let’s learn as a whole.
