Admire another researcher’s work? Tell them about it

About a year ago, I found myself enthusiastically telling a room of undergraduate students about a fellow researcher who I admire. I talked about her writing, her advocacy and how she used her research to push for change in our shared field of feminist psychology. A hand shot up from the lecture theatre: “Does she know?” the student asked.

Of course I hadn’t told her, I simply admired from a distance. I told a room full of students how important her writing is, I put her on reading lists, I cited her research in my papers. But the person whose work I was celebrating so heartily had absolutely no idea I was doing any of this.

So I hurried back to my office in the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds, UK, and sent a string of gushy e-mails to all of the people whose research I love. I told them that I admired their work and tried to be really specific about why. I didn’t ask for a collaboration or a meeting or anything in return; I just wanted them to realize that their work had impact.

The replies surprised me. Some were brief and grateful, others explained what the work had meant to them and a few told me that it was the first time anyone had explicitly told them that their research was appreciated. I had assumed these messages would be nice things to receive; I hadn’t realized quite how rarely we send them.

This whole exercise has made me notice how oddly little space there is for this kind of interaction in academic life. We have highly developed processes for telling one another what could be improved. Peer review, supervision, appraisal and promotion all require evaluation. Even our mechanisms for recognizing good work are often impersonal and reliant on metrics.

Being nice to people over e-mail clearly will not solve the structural problems of academic life, nor do I think that sending a kind message constitutes meaningful change on its own. But research cultures are developed through the ordinary ways in which people interact with one another. Perhaps one small contribution to a more generous academic culture is to become better at making our appreciation visible, particularly when there is nothing obvious to be gained from doing so.

Since sending that first flurry of e-mails, I have started a mini Academic Appreciation Project, giving researchers a simple way to send these messages to one another. In some ways, however, it is just a more organized version of the question that my student asked me. That prompt remains a useful one: if there is somebody whose work you regularly recommend, teach, cite or admire, do they know?

Shared from Nature Careers, for the original and more great content visit: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02668-1