Laboratory courses are essential in undergraduate physics education. The American Association of Physics Teachers recommends labs focus on developing students' experimental and professional skills, scientific reasoning, confidence, as well as other goals. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer a promising approach to achieve these goals--providing authentic research opportunities to entire student cohorts while lowering barriers to research participation. However, few physics CUREs are documented in the literature. Broadly, our work aims to determine effective practices for developing and implementing physics CUREs. When developing a CURE, instructors should consider how to align course learning goals, such as engaging students in authentic research, with both the structural elements of a CURE and students' perceptions of those goals. Here, we examine how students engage with one aspect of authentic  research, the idea of successful science, through an end-of-semester reflection assignment. We present the results of our analysis and compare how students in a CURE and those in a traditional lab course define successful science.