Nandita Quaderi: curiosity, change and the responsibility of research
Tim Gillett meets Web of Science’s Editor-in-Chief for the fifth in our Women in Scholarly Communications series
Supported by Cactus Communications
From dropping objects from a chair as a curious child to helping shape the policies behind one of the world’s most influential research information services, Nandita Quaderi’s career has been characterised by a willingness to follow interesting questions – even when they lead somewhere unexpected.
Today, as Senior Vice President and the Editor-in-Chief of Web of Science at Clarivate, with oversight of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Nandita works at the intersection of publishing, research assessment and research integrity. But her route there was anything but linear.
“I was always quite curious as a child, constantly asking ‘why this; how that?’,” she recalls. This curiosity developed into an interest in science at school and eventually an undergraduate chemistry degree at Oxford.
Chemistry itself, however, was not an immediate love affair. Quantum mechanics and differential equations proved less compelling than the research project she undertook in her final year, when she was able to move into molecular genetics. It was there that she found the area of science that really captured her imagination.
A PhD in molecular genetics at Imperial College London followed, during the excitement surrounding the Human Genome Project. Rather than making a conscious decision to become a scientist, Nandita describes the process as “more a kind of gradual realisation that I could make a career, a living doing something I really loved.”
After her PhD, an EU Marie Curie Fellowship took her to Milan and the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine. There, a project intended to explore comparative genomics took an unexpected turn when Nandita became intrigued by a short sequence of DNA that had been intended simply as a genomic marker.
That curiosity led her to clone the MID1 gene and discover its role in the rare congenital disorder Opitz syndrome. The work appeared in Nature Genetics – a significant milestone from her research career that remains quite literally close to her today: “It made it onto the cover of Nature Genetics and I still have it framed on the wall of my study.”
Returning to the UK, Nandita successfully applied for a Wellcome Trust fellowship to establish her own laboratory at King’s College London, initially in the Department of Craniofacial Development and subsequently in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology.
Yet, after five years as a junior principal investigator, she began to question whether the conventional academic research trajectory would give her the breadth of impact she wanted. Funding for the curiosity-driven basic research she loved was becoming harder to secure, while the realities of running a small laboratory meant that her research would inevitably remain highly specialised.
“I wanted to stay close to research and researchers but to work at a point in the system where I could have a much broader impact. Scholarly publishing offered that opportunity.”
From specialist to generalist
Publishing was not an obvious destination.
Nandita was not particularly attracted to the idea of becoming a journal editor making individual article decisions, and at the time knew relatively little about the range of other careers available within scholarly communication.
A friend at F1000 introduced her to colleagues at BioMed Central (BMC), and in 2005 she joined as an acquisitions editor, responsible for launching journals across the biological sciences. The transition required a fundamental change of perspective. Instead of knowing a great deal about one highly specialised area, she suddenly needed to understand emerging opportunities across a much broader scientific landscape.
It was also a particularly interesting moment to enter publishing. Open access was still relatively young, and BMC was among the pioneers attempting to establish a different model for research communication. She recalls: “It was very mission-driven and it felt like a place where we could make a meaningful contribution to how research was communicated and made available.”
Nandita progressed to become editorial director for the biological sciences, with responsibility for more than 90 journals. BMC was acquired by Springer in 2009 and, in 2014, she moved to Nature Publishing Group as publishing director with responsibility for its open-access journals. Nature Publishing Group subsequently merged with Springer – meaning, as she jokes, that she effectively ended up working for Springer twice by accident.
Those years included overseeing the growth of Scientific Reports, developing Nature’s partner-journal portfolio and creating a strategy for journals positioned between the highly selective Nature Communications and the sound-science model of Scientific Reports. That work led her to launch the Communications family of journals.
Looking back, however, Nandita remembers more than products, portfolios and publishing strategies: “It was a lot of change, a lot of work, a lot of pressure, a lot of achievements, but mostly it was a whole load of fun and a whole load of friendship.”
That emphasis on people is a recurring theme throughout her career. “It’s always about the people. It’s the people that make the difference.”
From publishing to research infrastructure
In 2018, Nandita made another significant move, joining Clarivate as Editor-in-Chief of Web of Science.
The attraction was partly the role and partly the opportunity to work again with former colleagues. But Web of Science also occupied a unique position in a research ecosystem she already knew from two very different perspectives.
As a scientist, where she published mattered. As a publisher, the inclusion of journals in Web of Science and their subsequent citation performance could have a profound effect on their ability to attract authors and develop their reputations: “It’s not just another bibliographic database. It’s a key part of the research infrastructure.”
Over the following eight years, Nandita’s responsibilities have expanded to also include oversight of ISI. She has built a global team, developed more transparent journal selection and deselection policies, clarified the selection process and criteria for the Highly Cited Researchers programme, and advanced work on research integrity and the representation of emerging research economies.
The influence of citation metrics, however, brings considerable responsibility.
Nandita is clear that bibliometrics can strengthen research assessment when used appropriately, particularly when they complement expert judgement. The problem begins when numbers become substitutes for that judgement – or when a metric designed for one purpose is used to answer an entirely different question.
“Metrics can and do have great value when they’re used responsibly as they can complement and strengthen peer review by adding objectivity and countering any biases in qualitative assessment,” she says.
But metrics are also powerful normative tools. Over-reliance on them, Nandita argues, has contributed to incentives that reward quantity rather than quality, while the misuse of journal-level indicators to assess individual papers or researchers compounds the problem.
Context matters too. Citation behaviour varies enormously between disciplines, making direct comparisons between, for example, mathematics and genetics journals potentially misleading. This was one reason Clarivate introduced the field-normalised Journal Citation Indicator in 2021, which can be considered alongside the Journal Impact Factor.
If she could redesign research assessment, Nandita says she would seek a healthier balance between expert qualitative assessment and appropriately contextualised quantitative measures. She would also move away from reducing complex performance data to single numbers. “There also needs to be a recognition of the plurality of research contributions which goes beyond just publications in journals and books and takes into account the societal impact of research.”
A systemic integrity problem
That question of incentives leads directly to one of the defining challenges facing scholarly communication today: research integrity.
Misconduct itself is not new. What has changed, Nandita believes, is its organisation and scale: “I realized the scale and in fact the nature of the problem had changed when integrity issues stopped looking like isolated incidents and started looking much more systematic.”
She first became aware of paper mills in 2014, but initially saw relatively little evidence of widespread systematic manipulation. By 2020, the issue was sufficiently prevalent to feature in an ISI report on research integrity; by 2022, Clarivate was investing in in-house AI tools to help Web of Science editors identify potentially compromised content.
For Nandita, the scale of the challenge means that individual organisations – and even individual sectors – cannot solve it alone.
The response, she says, needs to encompass researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, indexers, technology providers and learned societies. Nandita has been involved with United2Act since its beginnings, having been brought into the initiative in 2023 by former BMC colleague Deborah Kahn.
“No single organisation can protect research integrity on its own,” she says. “It really does take a village.”
Artificial intelligence makes that collective challenge still more complicated.
Nandita sees AI simultaneously as an accelerant of the problem and an increasingly essential part of the response. Generative tools have reduced the cost and effort required to create convincing fraudulent manuscripts, references, images and data. Yet the resulting volume of material also means purely human detection is no longer realistic.
“We need AI now to help us detect patterns and anomalies at a scale that humans just can’t manage alone. But we do need to keep humans in the loop. Editorial judgment and accountability still has to rest with people.”
Learning to lead
Nandita’s career has taken her from running a tiny research group to leading a global team. One lesson from that journey is that leadership is considerably harder than it can appear from the outside.
As a new manager, she believed leadership meant being the person who made all the decisions and possessed all the answers. Experience has changed that view. “I wish I knew from the start that the way to get the best out of people is to empower them, but at the same time clearly communicate what their priorities are, what the goals are, and what the expectations are.”
Good leadership, for Nandita, also means creating psychological safety: an environment in which people can question one another, debate ideas robustly and sometimes simply have a bad day.
Her scientific training continues to influence that approach. Curiosity remains important, as does a willingness to ask difficult questions and challenge accepted thinking. Science also instilled an appreciation of expertise that is not dependent on hierarchy. “There’s also a sort of very deep respect for expertise, you know, to listen to the experts. And they’re not necessarily always the most senior people in the room.”
Knowing when to stop
Away from work, Nandita and her husband have recently swapped London for a very old house in the Chiltern Hills, parts of which date back to the 1600s. Renovation is currently consuming much of their free time, but she is looking forward to rediscovering both the cultural life she enjoyed in London and the pleasures of the countryside.
Restaurants, theatre, exhibitions and galleries compete with woodland walks, country pubs and reading beside a fire. Travel is another passion, with Sri Lanka and Mexico high on her list.
There are also plans for a pottery studio in the barn.
Pottery offers something markedly different from a professional life spent dealing with information, policy and complex systems. Nandita enjoys the tactile process of transforming a lump of clay into something tangible – and the delicate balance between controlling the material and allowing it to behave as it will. “There’s that sense of being at the borders of control.”
There is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for a career that has repeatedly changed direction when an unexpected opportunity or interesting problem presented itself. Push too hard and the clay collapses; remain adaptable and something more interesting may emerge.
That adaptability is also central to Nandita’s advice for people entering scholarly communication today: “I’d say that everything is moving so fast, publishing is evolving so fast that adaptability and a willingness to learn, to keep learning, are the most important things.”
Relationship building and stakeholder management matter too, particularly in an ecosystem where almost every significant challenge crosses organisational boundaries.
But she would caution younger colleagues against worrying too much about following a prescribed route. “I’d say don’t worry about following some notion of a canonical research or career path. I certainly didn’t.”
Her own career makes the point particularly well. Molecular genetics led to developmental biology; a desire for broader influence led from the laboratory into open-access publishing; publishing led to research information and assessment; and metrics have increasingly brought her into the global effort to protect research integrity.
The common thread is not a carefully mapped career plan but curiosity: the instinct that once led a child to stand on a chair dropping objects to discover which would bounce, which would land and which would break.
In a scholarly communication environment now being reshaped by AI, changing approaches to assessment, new threats to research integrity and continuing evolution in publishing, that willingness to ask questions – and to follow where the answers lead – may be more valuable than ever.
Interview by Tim Gillett