TY - JOUR
T1 - Taxonomy for science and engineering indicators
T2 - A reassessment
AU - Feeney, Mary Kathleen
AU - Bozeman, Barry
N1 - Funding Information:
The third weakness in the current taxonomy of S&E fields emerges when researchers wish to analyze R&D funding. Funding for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary R&D projects currently falls under the category ‘not elsewhere classified’ (n.e.c.). The n.e.c. category is continually growing in the NSF Science Resources Statistics (SRS) data. For example, the amount of federal obligations for ‘life sciences, n.e.c.’ more than quadrupled from 1998 to 2001. The amount of federal obligations for total research to ‘engineering, n.e.c.’ in 2001 made up more than 25% of the total obligations to all fields of engineering for that year. In the case of psychological sciences, the obligations to ‘n.e.c.’ were approximately US$668.5 million, more than six times higher than the second grouping ‘social aspects’ (US$59.8 million) and more than 49 times that of ‘biological aspects’ (US$13.6 million) (National Science Foundation, 2004b). When catch-all categories become larger than the disaggregate S&E fields, the data become less meaningful to users.
Funding Information:
Mary Kathleen Feeney is Senior Research Associate and Barry Bozeman is Regents’ Professor at the Research Value Mapping Program, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 685 Cherry Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30330-0345, USA; email: mary.feeney@pubpolicy.gatech.edu; website: www.rvm. gatech.edu A revised version of this paper was presented at the SRI, Inc. Panel Meeting to Provide Guidance on SRS’s Evaluation of its Fields of Science and Engineering Taxonomies in Washington, DC, on 21–22 October 2004. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation, under contract SBR 98-18229, for support of the research project gathering the data reported here.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2005/12
Y1 - 2005/12
N2 - Science policy researchers and scientists themselves know reflexively that differences among scientific fields matter. However, sets of government-sponsored science and engineering (S&E) indicators are quite general and in most instances do not report differences among fields. We evaluate the current limitations of S&E indicators, identifying particular data needs about scientific fields. We suggest developing a dis-aggregated, flexible S&E classification. We argue that disaggregating S&E indicators through faceted analysis or webbed or networked databases will enable users to account for specialization, interdisciplinarity and emerging fields, and to adapt the S&E indicators across databases, making indicators more useful for international comparison.
AB - Science policy researchers and scientists themselves know reflexively that differences among scientific fields matter. However, sets of government-sponsored science and engineering (S&E) indicators are quite general and in most instances do not report differences among fields. We evaluate the current limitations of S&E indicators, identifying particular data needs about scientific fields. We suggest developing a dis-aggregated, flexible S&E classification. We argue that disaggregating S&E indicators through faceted analysis or webbed or networked databases will enable users to account for specialization, interdisciplinarity and emerging fields, and to adapt the S&E indicators across databases, making indicators more useful for international comparison.
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U2 - 10.3152/147154405781776139
DO - 10.3152/147154405781776139
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:33646364313
SN - 0958-2029
VL - 14
SP - 239
EP - 248
JO - Research Evaluation
JF - Research Evaluation
IS - 3
ER -