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A Strategy for Assessing Science
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Priority setting is a difficult, perennial issue in science policy, made more difficult in times of tightening research budgets. This report responds to a request from the Office of Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for advice on how best to judge the rates of progress in the research fields the office supports and to evalu- ate whether and how to shift the balance of research investments across fields. The request partly reflects a concern that traditional expert review processes are too strongly influenced by established disciplines and fields and too conservative in relation to the need to support research that might generate scientific breakthroughs. In developing our recommendations, we considered available knowl- edge about how science makes progress, which shows great variety in types of progress and paths to progress, as well as the considerable difficulty of accurately anticipating these paths. Research areas that appear at one time to be “hot” may prove in retrospect to have been fads, and fields that ap- pear unproductive may be stagnant, fallow, or pregnant. Accurate foresight is very difficult to achieve. We considered decision-making strategies that could address the sponsor’s concerns, along with other legitimate science policy concerns about the quality and rationality of the decision process, the accountability of decision making, and the appropriate balance of influence between scientific communities and agency science managers. Our recom- mendations are addressed to BSR, but we think the decision strategy we propose is appropriate for a wider range of federal science agencies within and beyond the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
0-309-66759-3
NONE
Social Science
English
2006
1-177
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