One main thought on my mind right now is how annoying it is when I forget to have something researching, sometimes one whole turn wasted with no research was one complete tech that I'm now behind. I feel it would be helpful to enlarge the research Icon, have it state the current research more obviously instead of the ticker that is now present, and have it glow, or make an audible sound, or even warn you via popup that no research is being conducted. With all the things going on it is sometimes easy to forget to look up there at that tiny research icon and notice none is being produced =)

This has been suggested and a summary list of improvement is listed here. If you feel certain ideas not rasied or have fresh ideas then please refer to this discussion thread

When you finish researching something a notification tells you if there is nothing in the queue.

There is a notification that a research project has completed, but it really is not obvious enough. I'd say there should be an audible sound bite that says "research completed". Also there is no notification at all that I saw to let the player know that no research projects are being worked on. Many times I queue multiple projects at a time so I may get the little timeline thing that shows research completing but there is no warning when all of them have completed and there are no more projects in queue. For this I would say have a audible warning stating that " no further research projects are queued" or something like that. Also I think it might be beneficial for research to have its own little "widget" that shows an icon representing the current research project and some information on the current project as opposed to the ticker and compact research tab included with all the other "section" icons. Think CIV 5 as far as research the research "widget" goes

The solution is very simple. Move the scrolling marquee to just above the Next Turn button.