Scientific indices such as the number of citations or impact factor have been widely adopted to gauge scientific outputs without sufficient deliberations on their relationships to the true value of science and researchers’ efforts or the unintended negative consequenses that result.

In the field of geoscience, a wide latitude of research styles exists and forms our community, from a focus on urgent societal needs to intellectual curiosity about our Earth. Such characteristics vary among fields making general comparisons across fields not straightforward. The adoption of simple evaluation indices as above may hinder the truly useful assessment of research. What is the right direction for science and how should science be assessed?

In this session, we invite the members of the geoscience research community to discuss “ideal” science, recognize its diversity and identify the needs for changes. Also for this year, we especially focus on the “contributions of the geosciences” toward the global social challenges based on the previous session results from AGU2020, JpGU-AGU2020, and JpGU21 community questionnaire.

• JpGU: Japan Geoscience Union -