Can Institutional Priorities Cause Important Unpopular Questions to Be Neglected?

What Happens to Important Questions That Do Not Fit the Priority List?

An institution cannot make everything a research priority. If every topic receives equal strategic emphasis, the word “priority” stops meaning very much.

Universities and research organizations therefore make choices. They may concentrate resources on artificial intelligence, sustainability, health innovation, advanced manufacturing, food security, digital education, or fields in which they already possess strong expertise. Funders make similar decisions when they issue targeted calls. Governments identify national research priorities. Departments develop research clusters around selected themes.

These choices can be useful. Concentrating expertise and resources can create research capacity that would be difficult to build if support were spread thinly across every possible field.

But prioritization has an unavoidable counterpart: some questions are prioritized less.

The difficult issue is whether questions that receive less strategic attention are merely lower priorities, or whether some genuinely important questions gradually become difficult to study because they are unfashionable, locally inconvenient, methodologically difficult, commercially unattractive, politically sensitive, or poorly aligned with the institution's current strategy.

Yes, Prioritization Can Create Blind Spots

Every Research Priority Creates an Opportunity Cost

Research priorities exist because resources are limited

Universities cannot build specialized facilities in every field, support every research center, hire expertise in every discipline, or provide internal funding for every proposal. Research funders face the same constraint. Priority setting is therefore not inherently suspicious. It is one mechanism for allocating scarce resources toward problems considered particularly important.

Formal priority-setting exercises can be quite sophisticated. Health research, for example, has used literature reviews, stakeholder consultation, consensus methods, workshops, surveys, and structured priority-setting partnerships to identify questions where research investment may be especially valuable.

A scoping review of methods for identifying health research gaps, needs, and priorities documented hundreds of such exercises and emphasized the value of systematic and transparent processes for directing limited funds toward areas with potential for impact.

The problem is not that priorities exist. It is that no priority-setting process can perfectly identify every question whose eventual importance will justify investment.

Not being prioritized is not the same as being unimportant

Research priorities reflect judgments made for particular purposes, by particular actors, at particular times. A university may prioritize areas that fit its expertise and mission. A government may emphasize national development objectives. A health funder may respond to disease burden. A private organization may support problems connected to its mandate.

These are legitimate forms of prioritization, but none provides a universal ranking of the value of knowledge.

The first does not logically establish the second.

Priorities influence more than formal funding

The most visible consequence of strategic priority setting may be where money goes, but resources extend beyond grants.

Priority areas may receive new faculty positions, laboratories, doctoral scholarships, research assistants, reduced teaching loads, seed grants, visiting scholars, partnerships, data infrastructure, communications support, and institutional recognition. Researchers working in those areas may find collaborators more easily because a community already exists around the theme.

Over time, these advantages can become self-reinforcing. More resources create more projects. More projects produce more publications and grant applications. Visible activity can then provide evidence that the area deserves continued investment.

Meanwhile, an important question outside the strategic portfolio may have no dedicated funding mechanism, no obvious research group, limited infrastructure, and fewer colleagues able to supervise or collaborate on the work.

No administrator needs to prohibit the question. It can become difficult to pursue simply because the surrounding research environment makes other questions easier.

Researchers anticipate what their institutions will support

Institutional priorities can influence topic selection before a proposal is submitted. Researchers learn which areas receive funding and recognition. Early-career researchers notice where positions and mentorship exist. Doctoral students learn which projects supervisors can support. Research leaders recognize which themes are likely to attract institutional investment.

This is one reason the question of whether you should pursue research mainly because your institution wants it matters beyond an individual project. If many researchers make the same reasonable adjustment, the collective research agenda can become increasingly concentrated.

Such concentration may be desirable when it builds critical mass around an important problem. It may be less desirable when researchers stop proposing questions outside the established portfolio because they assume those questions have little chance of support.

Popularity and importance do not always coincide

Some research areas are easier to rally around than others. Emerging technologies may attract institutional attention because they create opportunities for collaboration, funding, visibility, and new programs. Urgent public problems can appropriately generate concentrated research activity. Other topics may remain less visible because the affected population has limited political influence, commercial incentives are weak, relevant outcomes take years to observe, or the research does not map neatly onto current strategic language.

The World Health Organization's work on neglected tropical diseases provides a concrete reminder that research attention can be uneven. WHO notes that neglected tropical diseases disproportionately affect poor communities and calls for additional research and development on long-overlooked diseases, explicitly using research prioritization to direct limited resources toward urgent gaps.

The lesson extends beyond health research. Visibility, marketability, institutional prestige, and research importance can overlap, but they should not be assumed to do so.

Who participates in priority setting affects what becomes visible

A priority list partly reflects whose knowledge and concerns enter the process.

Research on public-health funding organizations has found variation in how funders generate and select priorities, including differences in stakeholder involvement. Other priority-setting approaches deliberately incorporate patients, practitioners, researchers, and members of the public because these groups may identify different unanswered questions.

This matters because researchers and end users do not necessarily rank research needs in the same way. Work synthesizing James Lind Alliance priority-setting exercises has emphasized that the questions selected by researchers or funders can differ from those emphasized by people with lived experience and professionals dealing with problems in practice.

Broad participation does not eliminate disagreement or guarantee a perfect agenda. It can, however, expose questions that would be less visible if priorities were established by a narrow group.

Institutional priorities can also protect neglected research

Priority setting is not only a source of neglect. It can be a remedy for it.

An institution may deliberately identify a neglected disease, underserved community, local environmental problem, endangered language, underdeveloped discipline, or methodological gap as a strategic priority precisely because existing research incentives have failed to support it adequately.

WHO's priority-setting work illustrates this logic in health research: areas with important knowledge gaps can be deliberately elevated so that funding and researcher attention move toward them.

The relevant question is therefore not whether priority setting is good or bad. It is whether the process notices what existing research systems systematically overlook.

Priorities can become stale

Research priorities are created under conditions that change. New evidence emerges. Technologies develop. Social problems shift. Previously obscure findings reveal unexpected importance. A crisis can expose a knowledge gap that was barely visible when a strategic plan was written.

Priority-setting research has consequently emphasized that priorities are context-dependent. A list that was defensible when developed should not automatically govern research indefinitely.

This is particularly important for multi-year institutional strategies. Stability helps researchers build programs and infrastructure, but excessive rigidity can lock resources into yesterday's assumptions.

Academic freedom provides a reason to preserve some unplanned inquiry

UNESCO's Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers recognizes open communication and academic freedom as central to scientific processes and emphasizes conditions that allow researchers to exercise intellectual freedom.

Academic freedom does not imply unlimited institutional resources for every topic. Resource allocation and freedom of inquiry are different questions. An institution can decline to prioritize a field without prohibiting research in it.

Still, preserving some capacity for investigator-led work has epistemic value. Research institutions cannot reliably predict where every major discovery, theoretical advance, or emerging problem will come from. A research portfolio composed entirely of centrally selected priorities risks reducing the diversity from which unexpected questions can emerge.

External incentives can reinforce institutional priorities

An institution rarely establishes its research strategy in isolation. Funding opportunities, government policies, industry partnerships, accreditation expectations, and university rankings may influence what leaders decide to emphasize.

This can create alignment across several incentive systems. A strategically favored field may receive external grants, internal support, recruitment, recognition, and reputational benefits simultaneously.

Again, that concentration can be productive. But when external measures become internal objectives, rankings and accreditation can distort institutional research priorities if the organization begins selecting research primarily according to what improves external indicators rather than what its scholarly and social mission requires.

How a Sensible Strategic Priority Can Create an Unintended Blind Spot

The solution is not necessarily to abandon the technology priority. The institution may have good reasons to maintain it. A more resilient strategy could preserve that concentration while also maintaining open investigator-led funding, periodically reviewing neglected areas, and creating routes through which researchers and external stakeholders can surface important questions that do not fit existing themes.

Common Misunderstandings About Research Priorities and Neglect

Do Not Use Institutional Attention as a Proxy for Research Importance

As a researcher, distinguish between a question's importance and the support currently available for studying it. The two affect your decision differently.

If a question is important but poorly aligned with institutional priorities, feasibility may genuinely be a problem. You may need different collaborators, external funding, a smaller initial study, another institutional home, or a longer time horizon. None of these difficulties proves that the question lacks value.

For institutions, one useful question is not simply, “Are researchers working on our priorities?” It is also, “What worthwhile research has become difficult to conduct because of the priorities we selected?”

That question is uncomfortable precisely because the neglected work may be difficult to observe. Researchers may stop proposing it. Early-career academics may never enter the field. Expertise may gradually disappear. By the time the institution recognizes the gap, the capacity needed to investigate it may already have weakened.

This is why a healthy research portfolio may need both concentration and slack: enough strategic focus to build meaningful capacity, but enough openness for questions that were not predicted by the strategic plan. The appropriate balance will vary across institutions, disciplines, and missions. Academic planning, like peer review, has yet to acquire clairvoyance.

Check Whether Research Priorities Are Creating Blind Spots

Questions About Research Priorities and Neglected Questions

Prioritize Research Without Treating the Priority List as the Boundary of Knowledge

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