Hi Naveen

Good question again. But you write: competition motivates a scientist to innovate. This is totally wrong: competition motivates scientists to compete, which is different. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what is innovation, from people who do not have a creative mind. To be a creative person means that you will go where nobody has been before, and as the consequence, you will be the first. To be the first because you're just a little bit more rapid than others in a competition is of very little interest. Encouraging competition leads to many people doing the same thing, which is a vast waste.

Firstly if we are taking Science field our aim should be giving good service to other peoples ... I think if two scientists are working in same field if they really want to go for service of people we need to work in a co-operative manner . but today's reality is that peoples are working for their own fame even if they are working on same Project they don't want to share thing results with other ... i think its depends on researchers if they work cooperatively it will benefit Nation and themselves.

As all things, it depends on the balance. Some competition is good to avoid stagnation. However, the current system with its overproduction of PhDs is creating too much competition for the few permanent posts that are around. Especially since in many countries the research concept is up or out. This is a very complex affair anyway, including politics (countries want to boast with their research output using "easy" to acquire numbers/metrics), funding (everyone wants to get the most bang for the buck), publishing (high output high impact - no one would say no to this). And the parties involved might be quite reluctant to change this; who should start? If professors take the first step, the ones that do so would have draw backs compared to those who don´t....so too few would do so. Funding agencies? They want to maximise output for international comparisons, who cares about the single individuals involved, it´s statistics for them. But I think this is where it needs to start. Create more staff scientist permanent positions to keep the "knowledge" in the group and have someone to teach and mentor PhD-students and fiddle with the experimental details, many professors are overburdened with paperwork and other institutional duties and do not have enough time to fulfil their part in PhD-student supervision and postdoc mentorship. This would at least take some of the pressure and would create alternatives for those that do not wish to go all they way up to the desktop job and are brilliant scientist in the lab. Reduce the number of funded PhD positions and (in most countries) increase their salaries and reduce the numbers of life-science students; filter for "quality" and not "mass". Reducing the number of people who get into the system will take a huge part of the pressure/competition and hopefully will let people focus more on the science than on strategic considerations.

Anyway, That´s all just my personal impression. Here are some articles by smarter people that might be of interest for this discussion:

http://www.thelancet.com/series/research

And here is a two threads about publishing - which in my opinion is tightly linked to the problems we are facing due to competition et al:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Nature_Cell_and_Science_are_they_good_or_bad_for_science_discussion_about_recent_article_in_the_guardian

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_are_your_views_on_the_recently_published_San_Francisco_Declaration_of_Research_Assessment_the_so-called_DORA_document2

I agree with Christoph. Competition is rather illusion about better solving problems. Good science needs enough time to finding proper solutions, what is excluded in conditions of run for publications. Competition have no time for waiting. Maximizing of publication number for impact factoring and global competition all with all is killing science as good service for other people. Who is responsible for this? According me - big corporations standing in the shadow of scientific acitivity and gathering money from monopolizing all what give money from publication process to catching results, and politics in science believing that parametrization may be good tool for measuring human brains. What is answer of scientists (especially these young without clear perspectives of stabilization and totally stressed in fighting about work). They are gather in larger groups for gain more publications, not to solve problems multidisciplinary, they repeat the research made by their collegues even plagiarize. Why? Because they want to survive in this challenge full of fear. This is not good face of science and it is very distant from ethical norms which are traditionally identificate with science.

Thanks for sharing this question, Naveen. In my mind, competition is a neutral thing. I mean that it can be good, ensuring the product is of a high quality. But on the other hand, it can be negative in that some scientists will compete unfairly. Some have the advantage by their relationships with important people or institutions and organizations. Furthermore, we are not competing on an even playing field, considering that it is harder for some of us in 3rd world countries, where we have fewer journals to publish our work. Thanks again.

Competition in any field has many negative consequence; manly that the players involved will do anything to win. When integrity of work is the of the highest concern, competition should be controlled.

I want to add, that I am not agains competition. I think it automatically comes with any professional human activity and that it does increase productivity. Especially in science, I think a certain amount of competition was always there. In the post-impact factor times there were still rankings of how prestigious a journal was (Science, Nature, Cell... where always considered "good" journals) or an institute (Harvard, Oxford, etc) or a name (nobel price winners etc). So the riddle to solve, in my opinion, is not about whether competition is good or bad. It´s about the right balance...which is not as trivial to find as to write this sentence, because what is "right balance" :-)

Really a nice question asked, Naveen. It´s challenging :-)

Naveen:

You begin with "Competition motivates a scientist to innovate."

This is an unfortunate and superficial statement often repeated.

As history of science clearly testifies, at the highest scientific levels, this statement is not supported at all. What *mainly* moves science ahead is the internal---I emphasize internal---ambition of a scientist to innovate. Here are the typical examples: Newton and Darwin didn't even want to publish their most known results of research until others prompted them to do so. And one cannot easily find more different scientists that those two.

Competition is something external to science and was brought into science by our economic & political system. The famous rivalries in science such as, for example, between Newton and Leibniz have nothing to do with "competitions" but are the (unfortunate) occasional debates about the priorities of great discoveries.

There is an old Russian saying that "rush is only appropriate when catching fleas and when having diarrhea". I don't think research should be added to that list. ;--)

The main output of the "competitive" research is an enormous mass of the results relatively easily producible on the basis of existing knowledge, but at the same time, such activities inevitably 'mask' the scientific work that does not easily follow from the existing knowledge. There are times in history when such "competitive' activities are more appropriate (immediately after a scientific revolution), but are we not facing today, in practically all sciences, unprecedented scientific questions? So our period just *predates* the coming, and probably the greatest, scientific revolution.

Good answer, Lev. Actually, governments do not support science, but they want their country to be technologically ahead. If this makes sense is not clear for me, but it is good to remember that Kepler earned his living with astrology, not astronomy.

Competition in scientific research has many perverse bad consequences among which a main one is to degrade the human relationships between researchers. And good relations are essential for a good research. I cannot tell how many points have progressed while discussing around a beer with colleagues who were also friends.

Such friendship generates an emulation which can be seen as a sane rivality. A good discussion between colleagues is a discussion where all is said without fear to see ideas to be stolen but where ideas are shared. This is not possible when there is competition. On the other hand, working alone is also bad and poorly efficient.

Finally, evaluation is a normal process when somebody is receiving money for doing something, but this does not imply competition.

So competition, no, emulation yes!

A very good point Liegeois. Competition sure does spoil relationships among researchers. People are hesitant to discuss ideas openly which not good for science.

In order to not take this off topic I started a new thread about ideas - crazy, realistic ... - how to improve the current research system. Let´s play with some hypothesis and see what will come out of it :-)

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Discussion_about_possible_ways_to_improve_the_current_research_system#share

I agree with a lot that has been said - intense competition becomes self-limiting. Innovation, which is essential, is different from competition. Discoveries should be freely available for everyone, science after all is for the common good, where ideas should be shared and not “owned” for self-promotion. Less competition, and more encouragement for communication with others who can share in and understand the issues, as well as the general public, would do a lot of good…I think

Good question again Naveen, thank you. I agree with most of the previous opinions and comments. Competition among scientist is meaningless to Science and useless for the progress of society. It doesn't matter to Science or Society who came up first with one given discovery. It matters whether the findings are meaningful and useful. Scientist should not be pushed to compete with each other, but to collaborate and share to achive higher goals -or achive their goals faster. And due recognition should be given to each of the participants, so the collaboration is rewarding for all. In this regard, I am concerned that the new trend to value differently the participation of each author in a paper by granting agencies (more credit is given to the first and /or the corresponding author) may increae competition among researchers and discourage collaboration. I have started a "spin off" question dealing with this topic:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Should_the_contribution_of_each_individual_author_of_an_article_be_valued_differently

Agree with most opinions. Competition cant be the motivation. I mean You cant do science just to compete other one. To be successful, he motivation should come from yourself.

If fairly done, competition is always a good thing. But, the one thing competition do motivates is unfair means. This leads to all anomalies in science.