For researchers, it has become impossible to escape from the word ¡°excellence¡±. The government¡¯s new higher education White Paper uses it 115 times. The word appears 13 times in the? of the UK¡¯s research councils carried out by former Royal Society president Sir Paul Nurse. And a search of the Times Higher Education website shows that it litters multiple stories every week.

But a group of academics say that the ever-increasing need for researchers to show the ¡°excellence¡± of their work is damaging science.

They argue that academia should instead focus on ¡°soundness¡± and distribute money more widely across researchers and universities.

The exaltation of ¡°excellence¡± ¨C most notably by the research excellence framework, which was previously called the research assessment exercise ¨C gives academics ¡°an incentive to inflate your work¡±, said Martin Paul Eve, professor of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London.

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The term lacks meaning because academics are bad at deciding what research is ¡°excellent¡± and what is merely good, he argued.

Professor Eve is one of five authors of a new paper, ¡°¡±, currently in submission to a journal, which cites a study that found that when previously accepted papers were resubmitted to journals in a slightly altered form, about 90 per cent were rejected, ¡°in other words, for being insufficiently ¡®excellent¡¯ now by journals that had previously decided they were ¡®excellent¡¯ enough to enter the literature¡±.

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Even if it is meaningless, an endless focus on ¡°excellence¡± is far from ¡°harmless¡±, said Professor Eve.

Experiments that attempt to replicate the findings of previous studies are not seen as ¡°excellent¡±, he argued, and therefore have lower status ¨C contributing to the current ¡°reproducibility crisis¡± in science.

The need to appear ¡°excellent¡± may even encourage fraud by scientists, the paper claims, as ¡°hypercompetition¡± for career advancement, publication in ¡°top¡± journals and research grants has increased.

It stresses that it is not against the ¡°pursuit of quality per se¡± but the concentration of resources on only the ¡°excellent¡±, which leads to ¡°the intense competition to make it into the top few percent¡±.

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Instead, the paper suggests that money should be distributed more widely, perhaps even by lottery ¨C although it admits that this would be politically tricky.

Nonetheless, Professor Eve said that a shift away from concentrating money on ¡°excellence¡± might gain traction in government as ¡°research ministers do understand that research is not just big breakthroughs¡±.

Instead of ¡°excellence¡±, the research community should instead aim for ¡°soundness¡±, the paper argues, which stresses whether or not research has ¡°appropriate standards of description, evidence and probity¡± rather than ¡°flashy claims of superiority¡±.

This approach has already been adopted by the journal Plos One, which publishes any research that is scientifically sound, ¡°regardless of its perceived novelty or impact¡±.

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But Professor Eve acknowledged that there was a ¡°danger¡± that too much emphasis on ¡°soundness¡± could lead to a stream of dull experiments that did little to advance understanding ¨C for example, a study to double check the boiling point of water would be scientifically sound, but useless.

¡°It¡¯s always going to have to have a balance,¡± he said.

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david.matthews@tesglobal.com