Every time I encounter a need to provide an impact statement or when I read for-impact studies, I get an ick because ‘impact’ and ‘science’ are barely related and often contradict each other. You can make a lot of impact without science. You can do science without any impact. Moreover, if you are doing science for impact, you are not doing science at all. Focus on the impact changes the subject from understanding to manipulation and, most importantly, compromises the method, which is a core of science.

Researchers, of course, are rarely driven by pure curiosity, many pursue research for vanity, some do it to advance their careers or to achieve a certain impact. But these are confounders of science that should be controlled and balanced, not praised! These are essentially conflicts of interests, where pure curiosity and drive for understanding are being compromised. Can a conflict of interests pay for research and stimulate it? Yes, absolutely. Tobacco and oil businesses are eager to sponsor scientists. Is it a problem and does it question the results of this research? Unquestionably.

Likewise, when an academic runs an experiment to advance their career, they are committing to a wrong goal which inevitably leads to worse science. The examples are numerous, from the replication crisis to outright fraud to conscious bias. Open science framework is doing a great job at policing consequences of the wrong motivations, but it does not address the root cause of it – a system of wrong incentives.

The only motive making science possible is pure curiosity, everything else should count as a potential conflict with pure curiosity. The other motivations, however virtuous and justified, lead to bias in science. When you write a paper to get a job, it’s a trap: you have better reasons to p-hack and fake the results rather than reporting real research outcomes. Doing science does not even require writing papers, it can be communicated through many other media, or even not communicated at all!

I think it is wildly misunderstood by university administrators, by funders, by general public, and even by many academics themselves (partly because universities and funders produce this kind of academics). Science isn’t just another industry and it cannot survive under the same system of incentives.

What is scientific about trying to find a drug that cures cancer? Colloquially there should be some ‘science behind’ it. Indeed, the pursuit of the drug puts the science behind, by putting the impact first. If some treatment suddenly works but we don’t know why, the aim of ‘finding a drug’ will be achieved but the science will not be advanced. Science begins when we start asking why this treatment worked. ‘Doing science’ is not virtuous, it’s innocent or even naïve.

While natural scientists can find refuge for their curiosity in formulas and abstract matters, in the social sciences, such conflicts of interests are much more problematic, as research is centered on humans and tied to the applied Christian-humanistic values. If your main goal is fighting social inequality, your inequality research would be necessarily biased similar to a desperate student who aims to find statistical significance. Reflecting on consequences of your research is important (we don’t want another bomb) but failing to do so doesn’t make science less scientific  – whereas focus on consequences invalidates the scientific nature of activity.

I understand that science needs a social interface, like a data center needs a user-friendly website. Science sometimes has to explain itself to the world. But the communication of the results is not a replacement for the substance: writing a paper is not a research outcome, it is no more equivalent to running an experiment than a logo on your shoes is equivalent to the shoes themselves. And the current ethos of academia puts communication – especially with increasingly general audiences – to the center, as it increases the audience size, and therefore citations, IF of journals, funding, and all sorts of social privileges that follow. Engagement of audiences depends on referring to issues they consider important, hence emphasis on societal impact, hence pivoting towards the ‘science-for-impact’. This is a dead end for science.

As maximalist and purist as some of the above may sound, I do believe these basic claims should be reiterated and reminded to everyone involved in and affecting science. I am not saying that science is somehow more valuable than ‘impact’, not at all, I am just saying that they are not even in the same family.