Science has changed considerably over the past decades. Never before has the number of scientists been so high. At the same time, science has also become more international and international exchange has become normal in the scientific community. Yet, there still are differences in the concrete circumstances, the framework conditions and the resources available for scientific work.
Currently, however, we know very little about the way scientists collaborate and communicate, how they think about their work and how they perceive the conditions of their scientific activities. International comparative studies and surveys are few and far between, and those that exist are often limited to countries in the West and the North. Little is known about the conditions for scientific work and scientific knowledge production in the countries of the Global South.
Against this background, ResearchGate and DZHW are planning a global state of the research community survey that will also reach the countries of the Global South, using access to the science platform ResearchGate. ResearchGate currently has about 20 million registered users in over 190 countries. DZHW, on the other hand, has extensive experience in creating representative science surveys, especially in German-speaking countries. The ResearchGate-DZHW state of the community survey is to bring together the competences of both institutions and to substantially expand existing surveys with regard to the international perspective, having a low-threshold accessibility. Topics of the survey are: sociodemographic characteristics of scientists, their satisfaction, assessments of academic freedom, career prospects, perceptions of regional and international networking as well as statements on participation in scientific discourse. The aim is to gain a differentiated insight into the global structure of science as well as into concrete, local and heterogeneous practices of research and to identify the central challenges that scientists experience in their everyday research.
