EAGER-Profiles: Using researcher profiles to demonstrate the impact of investments in science

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Evaluating the return on investment in science involves accurately associating research inputs (e.g., grants and contracts) with research outputs (e.g., publications and patents). Because many of today's significant discoveries are produced by large multi-institution, cross-disciplinary teams -- often supported by different sponsors, with potential impact spread across different fields -- accurately linking outputs to inputs can be challenging. This research investigates whether and to what extent an online profiling system that aggregates research data around the individual researcher facilitates the processes of linking research inputs to outputs and provides benefits to scientists, institutions, publishers, and agencies. It compares the value of using different data sources, such as federal systems, institutional repositories, commercial databases, manual data entry by librarians and administrators, and data entry by the scientists themselves, to populate a prototype website that profiles computer scientists from multiple institutions. Intellectual Merit: The research breaks new ground in a variety of ways. It determines the cost and effort required to obtain each data source, including the resources needed to disambiguate names in order to link data on scientific contributions to the correct people responsible for them; it calculates the potential reduction in administrative burden each data source provides by measuring the amount of time it takes for a scientist, without the help of a researcher profiling system, to manually locate the data and enter it into an online form; and it evaluates which data sources contain the most information about high-impact cross-institutional or multi-disciplinary research, using data mining techniques to generate collaboration and topic-cluster maps. This study is appropriate for the EAGER program because it is both high-risk -- in that the outcome depends on the coordination of multiple software products, institutions, agencies and data sources in a rapid timeframe -- and high-reward, in that a successful prototype would accelerate the implementation of a national researcher profiling system that benefits multiple stakeholders. The field of Computer Science exemplifies all the challenges and potential rewards of a nation-wide researcher profiling system. Computer scientists are funded by many different agencies (NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD, NASA, etc.); their research outputs take many forms (publications, conference presentations, software, databases, algorithms, patents, etc.); and they collaborate across many disciplines (such as medicine, economics, engineering, physics, and social science). Broader impacts: A publicly-accessible national researcher-profiling system based on linked open data promises numerous benefits beyond enabling more accurate measures of return on federal investment in science. These benefits include the potential to streamline the grant application and reporting process for researchers, identify reviewers without conflicts of interest, help researchers find collaborators, match trainees and junior investigators with mentors and jobs, and enable scientists to showcase their work.