Next week I’m going to be embarking on a year-long project with StoryArcs and the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) examining and critiquing the narratives told in UK research today.
I’ve worked in academic research and public engagement for a decade, using storytelling techniques to engage both public and academic audiences with my work through writing, presenting and broadcasting. For the last two years, I have been running a business teaching storytelling to researchers to help them do the same.
My experience has shown me that storytelling can be an incredibly powerful toolbox for researchers to use to disseminate their work to each other and the public. But the way that researchers are framing their stories may not be serving researchers, research, or the wider academic community well.
This is because researchers must adopt multiple roles when they communicate their research; the author, the narrator and the protagonist. In my view, playing all these parts simultaneously makes researchers inherently unreliable narrators. The UKRN’s concern is that the ‘publish or perish’ pressures on researchers to pump out high quality and high quantity outputs means that their narratives serve to persuade, rather than inform. Researchers as authors write to persuade the gatekeepers; editors, peer reviewers, PhD examiners, conference audiences, grant panels etc. - that they are worthy of their place in the ivory tower.
Such persuasive storytelling encourages the narrator to spin positive stories, and the author must retrospectively weave a narrative in which they, the protagonist, arise the hero. To write such clean narratives obfuscates precious data points about failures, blind alleys and messiness in the research. In the best case scenario, this results in shorter, simpler, more impressive publications. But in the worst case scenario, we lose important information about the researcher’s thought process, biases, expectations and flaws that may be crucial for us, the audience, to critically assess the conclusions that they came to.
To address this problem, my aim over the next year is to explore whether and how research reporting needs to shift its emphasis from persuading to informing, in order for research to become more authentic, honest and transparent. Guided by an advisory panel of experts from across research, journals and the media, I intend to interrogate current research reporting, assess the strengths and flaws of its narratives, and use creative methods to test alternative approaches towards achieving this goal.