Abstract
Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for understanding the role of science in human society. Here we examine public use and public funding of science by linking tens of millions of scientific publications from all scientific fields to their upstream funding support and downstream public uses across three public domains—government documents, news media and marketplace invention. We find that different public domains draw from various scientific fields in specialized ways, showing diverse patterns of use. Yet, amidst these differences, we find two important forms of alignment. First, we find universal alignment between what the public consumes and what is highly impactful within science. Second, a field’s public funding is strikingly aligned with the field’s collective public use. Overall, public uses of science present a rich landscape of specialized consumption, yet, collectively, science and society interface with remarkable alignment between scientific use, public use and funding.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1344-1350 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Nature human behaviour |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2022 |
Funding
In this Article, we advance a measurement framework to study public uses of science, the public funding of science and how public use and public funding relate. Building on prior research that considers the use of science within a given public domain, here we integrate five large-scale datasets that link scientific publications from all scientific fields to their upstream funding support and downstream public uses across three public domains. Our first dataset (D) is scientific publications, using Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which is one of the largest bibliometric databases of scientific research in the world ( and Supplementary Note ). Our second dataset (D) leverages the Microsoft Bing search engine to collect about 6 million government documents available online across all branches of the US government. Using a machine reading technology, we systematically identify academic publications that are referenced in these government documents and match these references to MAG. This pipeline allows us to collect a high-scale dataset on how government documents consume scientific knowledge ( and Supplementary Note ). In total, we identify 389,896 unique academic publications cited by 43,014 government documents. We further leverage a secondary policy documents database, Overton, to help validate results obtained from D (Supplementary Note ). Our third dataset (D) uses the Altmetric data to track academic publications covered by mainstream media reports. Matching these publications to the MAG data yields 724,849 unique papers covered by 2,701 media outlets ( and Supplementary Note ). Building on prior work, our fourth dataset (D) links all patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to the academic papers they reference, yielding 4,276,940 papers cited by 1,932,642 patents ( and Supplementary Note ). Our main results focus on papers published between 2005 and 2014, a common period covered by all three datasets, resulting in 128,465, 275,536 and 1,296,922 papers cited in government, news and patent documents, respectively. Finally, we integrate funding records, using the Dimensions dataset (D), which includes 5 million projects funded by over 400 funding agencies worldwide and links each funded project with its resulting publications ( and Supplementary Note ). The section and Supplementary Notes and further detail the construction of each dataset and additional validations. – 1 2 2 3 , –, 4 5
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Behavioral Neuroscience