Article by Brian Owens: “Scientific research offers many benefits to society, but how do you trace the impact of specific projects? It’s easy to track which papers result from a grant, but much harder to follow how research has broader societal impacts on policies, medicines or products.
“Those are much more exciting [impacts], and provide greater public good,” says Dashun Wang, director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Wang and his colleagues built a tool called Funding the Frontier, which integrates data on research publications, patents, policy papers and clinical trials, and presents the information in a visually intuitive way. They also combined the tool with a machine-learning-driven predictive algorithm to forecast which studies and fields are likely to lead to the most societal benefits in the future — for example, which grants are most likely to result in a patent. They described the prototype in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server1.
Funding the Frontier includes a mind-boggling amount of data, drawn from four large data sets: the Dimensions, Altmetric and Overton databases, as well as the authors’ own SciSciNet data set. The total collection links 7 million research grants to 140 million scientific publications, 160 million patents, 10.9 million policy documents, 800,000 clinical trials and 5.8 million newsfeeds, all published between 2000 and 2021, with 1.8 billion citation linkages among them. The data can be displayed in several ways, showing the impacts that flowed from a particular study and tracing outcomes back to their sources and all the links between them.
Staša Milojević, who studies the science of science at Indiana University in Bloomington and was not involved in developing the tool, says that it could help to fill an important gap when it comes to translating studies of how science works into useful data. “Many studies in the area of ‘science of science’ have potential science-policy and funding implications,” she says. “However, their practical impact is often limited because they lack the tools that stakeholders can easily use to obtain useful insights.”
The size of the database, and its ability to link disparate strands together, is the biggest advantage, says Milojević. “The sheer amount of data, and the degree of data aggregation associated with FtF [Funding the Frontier], is impressive,” she says. “Even without its predictive aspect, having a tool that allows one to look up PIs [principal investigators] or grants from wide areas of science and evaluate them in terms of their various research metrics normalized for variations over fields and time is extremely useful.”..(More)”.
