01 · The Question
Do Researchers and Research Systems Value the Same Things?
A researcher might begin a project because a question has bothered them for years. They may want to solve a problem, understand a phenomenon, help a particular community, challenge an assumption, develop expertise, or simply discover what the evidence says.
Then the project enters an institutional system. A university may count the publication. A promotion committee may consider the journal, contribution, or citations. A funder may assess outputs and outcomes. An award committee may recognize the work. The researcher and the system are now evaluating the same activity, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
This distinction is easy to miss because motivation and reward interact. Researchers learn what their institutions value, and institutional rewards can influence what researchers choose to do. Still, why someone conducts research and why an organization rewards that research remain conceptually different questions.
03 · What You Need to Know
The Researcher and the Reward System Answer Different Questions
Motivation Asks Why the Researcher Acts
Motivation concerns why someone initiates, directs, and sustains an activity. A researcher may investigate a problem because the inquiry is inherently interesting, because they value its potential contribution, because research forms part of their professional identity, because they need to complete a degree, or because publications are required for promotion.
These motives can coexist. The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic research motivation therefore describes something about the researcher's reasons for acting rather than simply the outcome of the project.
Rewards Ask What Happens Because the Researcher Acts
Rewards are valued experiences or outcomes associated with research. Some may be intrinsic to the activity, such as enjoyment, mastery, or the satisfaction of discovery. Others are separable outcomes, including publications, qualifications, promotion, funding, recognition, or employment opportunities.
Institutions also construct formal reward systems. They decide which achievements count in recruitment, promotion, workload allocation, awards, grant competitions, or other forms of evaluation. Those systems communicate what the organization values, or at least what it has chosen to measure and reward.
This is why the rewards of doing research should be distinguished from the motivations that brought the researcher to the activity in the first place.
The Difference Can Be Seen by Asking Two Separate Questions
Why am I doing this research?
This is primarily a motivation question. Possible answers include curiosity, contribution, professional identity, social need, qualification, promotion, or other personally relevant reasons.
Why will this research be rewarded?
This is primarily an incentive and assessment question. The answer depends on what a university, funder, employer, discipline, or other system chooses to recognize.
The answers may coincide. A researcher might value producing rigorous, openly reported research, and an institution might explicitly reward those practices. But alignment should not be assumed.
A Researcher Can Value Something the Institution Barely Rewards
Imagine a researcher who values mentoring junior colleagues, carefully documenting datasets, conducting replication studies, sharing reusable code, or spending substantial time engaging with a community affected by the research. These activities may be important to the researcher's conception of good scholarship.
Yet traditional assessment systems may give greater visibility to publications, citation metrics, and grant income. The National Academies has noted that researcher assessment at U.S. academic institutions has often relied heavily on traditional indicators such as grants and publication metrics while other contributions to integrity, transparency, accessibility, innovation, and societal impact can be undervalued.
The Hong Kong Principles respond to a similar concern by proposing that researcher assessment explicitly recognize responsible research practices, complete reporting, open research, diverse forms of scholarship, and contributions such as peer review and mentoring.
An Institution Can Reward Something That Was Not the Researcher's Original Motivation
The reverse is equally possible. A researcher might begin a project because of pure curiosity and later discover that the resulting publication contributes to promotion. Another might investigate a local problem because they believe it matters and subsequently receive an award.
Receiving those rewards does not rewrite the researcher's original motivation. The distinction between motivation and reward therefore also protects against simplistic judgments about researchers based solely on what they gain from their work.
Rewards Can Become Motivators
Although motivation and rewards are different concepts, they interact. Once a researcher anticipates a reward, that expected outcome can become part of the reason for acting.
Suppose a university announces that publication in particular journals will receive substantial recognition in promotion decisions. A researcher who previously chose projects largely according to intellectual interest may begin considering whether each project is likely to produce the rewarded type of publication. The institutional reward has now entered the researcher's motivational environment.
This does not automatically make the resulting research worse. Incentives are often intended to influence behavior. The important question is what behavior they encourage.
Reward Systems Can Align With Research Values
Institutions need not choose between having incentives and supporting good research. Reward systems can recognize behaviors that contribute to trustworthy scholarship.
The Hong Kong Principles provide a useful example. Rather than focusing only on conventional outputs, they recommend assessing responsible research practices, valuing complete reporting regardless of results, rewarding open research, recognizing diverse forms of scholarship, and acknowledging activities such as mentoring and peer review.
This approach treats assessment as a design problem: if institutions want researchers to invest time in rigorous and responsible practices, those practices should not consistently place researchers at a career disadvantage compared with activities that generate more easily counted outputs.
Misalignment Creates an Incentive Problem
Problems become more likely when what the system rewards differs substantially from what good research requires. Careful validation may take time, while an evaluation system may reward speed. A replication may be scientifically useful but less prestigious than a novel claim. Transparent reporting of inconclusive results may contribute to the evidence base but attract less attention than a dramatic finding.
Researchers then face trade-offs between what appears scientifically worthwhile and what appears professionally advantageous.
| Research activity or outcome |
Why a researcher might value it |
How a reward system might treat it |
| Investigating a difficult unanswered question |
Curiosity or scientific importance |
May be rewarded only if it eventually generates recognized outputs |
| Publishing a paper |
Communicating findings |
May count toward recruitment, promotion, or performance assessment |
| Reporting an inconclusive result |
Completeness and scientific transparency |
May receive less visibility in some environments |
| Sharing reusable data or code |
Transparency, reproducibility, and reuse |
May or may not receive substantial formal recognition |
| Mentoring junior researchers |
Developing people and sustaining a research community |
Recognition varies among institutions |
| Winning research funding |
Enabling future research |
May itself be treated as evidence of research achievement |
These examples are illustrative rather than universal. Research assessment varies widely by discipline, institution, country, funder, and career stage.
Measurable Outputs Are Proxies, Not the Research Mission
Institutions face a genuine practical difficulty: broad concepts such as research quality, contribution, integrity, or societal value cannot be captured perfectly in a single indicator. Evaluation therefore relies on evidence and proxies.
Publications, citations, grants, awards, and other indicators may each provide useful information. Trouble begins when a proxy is treated as though it were the underlying objective itself.
A publication is evidence that work has been disseminated, not proof that it is correct. Citation counts indicate scholarly referencing, not a direct measurement of research quality. Grant income indicates success in obtaining resources through a particular funding process, not proof that every funded project will produce important findings.
Reward Systems Can Affect Research Integrity
The relationship between incentives and integrity deserves particular attention. The National Academies has argued that research integrity depends partly on environments in which institutional arrangements, policies, practices, and incentive structures support responsible conduct. It also notes that organizations can contribute to detrimental research practices when they fail to recognize incentive and reward systems that undermine the research enterprise.
This does not mean a particular incentive automatically causes misconduct. Researchers retain responsibility for their conduct, and the causal relationships among competition, incentives, questionable practices, and misconduct are complex. It does mean that research organizations share responsibility for examining the environments they create.
Watch Out
Do not treat every association between incentives and research behavior as proof that researchers are being corrupted by rewards. Incentives operate alongside disciplinary norms, employment conditions, individual values, resources, leadership, collaboration, and many other influences. The stronger claim requires stronger evidence.
The Distinction Becomes Crucial When the Reward Replaces the Purpose
Suppose publication was originally rewarded because disseminating knowledge is valuable. Over time, researchers may begin treating the number of publications as the objective itself. At that point, the indicator has become detached from at least part of the reason it was valuable.
This is the conceptual bridge to a more difficult question: what happens when publishing becomes the goal rather than the research? The problem is not that publication ceased to matter. It is that the means of communicating research can become the target around which the research process is organized.
04 · A Practical Example
A Worthwhile Project Can Look Very Different Through an Evaluation System
Hypothetical Example
A Researcher Studies a Locally Important Problem
Suppose a researcher spends three years investigating a difficult educational problem affecting a relatively small population. The researcher chooses it because the problem matters to local schools and because existing evidence is inadequate.
Why the researcher begins The question is intellectually interesting and potentially useful to practitioners.
What the project requires The researcher spends substantial time building partnerships, collecting difficult-to-obtain data, validating the analysis, and communicating with participating schools.
What the institution records The eventual research assessment prominently records the resulting publication and perhaps its journal, citations, or associated funding.
The potential mismatch Much of what made the project worthwhile to the researcher and community may be only partially visible in the formal reward system.
This does not mean the institution's indicators are useless. A publication is relevant evidence of scholarly output. The problem would be assuming that the recorded indicator captures the entire value of the project.
The reverse problem is also possible. If the institution strongly rewards publication quantity, the researcher may begin choosing future projects partly according to how efficiently they can generate papers. The reward system has then moved from evaluating research to influencing what research is undertaken.
