What is Research Culture?

Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms of our research communities. It influences researchers’ career paths and determines the way that research is conducted and communicated. (Royal Society).

A positive research culture helps support all research staff to enjoy their work, providing an environment where colleagues feel valued and are free to express themselves, share ideas and build connections with one another. Ultimately, a good research culture will help academics thrive and to build their career.

For higher education institutions, a positive research culture will help to attract and retain talent, and improve the quality of research undertaken overall.

If you would like to work with us or would like us to share your research culture work, please email ncrc@warwick.ac.uk

Why a National Centre?

Research culture is a prominent issue in the UK research and innovation sector. The effort to improve research culture in higher education has often been fragmented, with risk of duplication of effort, or limited sharing of good practice. We aim to reduce these risks by acting as a collaborative, central hub for sharing good practice and creating solutions.

The National Centre for Research Culture will work with UK research funding bodies and universities to coordinate our collective efforts, seeking synergy and sharing best practice across the sector, with a sustained, substantial focus on improving research culture and environment.

Why Warwick?

The University of Warwick first started 'formally' talking about research culture in 2021/22 when it held its first Research Culture Conference, set up a Research Culture Forum, Operation Groups and its work in projects such as Research England funded TALENT Programme and EPSRC funded WASC.

We recognised that many of the challenges being discussed were likely the same for many Universities, and therefore, we would only start to resolve some of these through a collaborative model, and working with others in the sector.

Following this, the NCRC was set up to respond to this, and the first International Research Conference was held in 2023, which continues to grow in scale. NCRC have since developed a portfolio of activities to include networking, regular events, and working on collaborative funded initiatives. We have an external Advisory Board made up with members from Vitae, UK Reproducibility Network, The British Academy, and UKRI, as well as Early Career Researcher representation.