TLS: Assessing the Impact of Science Policy on the Rate and Direction of Scientific Progress: Frontier Tools & Applications

虽然知识的积累性质被认为是经济增长的核心，但积累的微观经济和制度基础却鲜为人知。尽管“开放科学”被广泛认为在基础知识的生产和传播中发挥着核心作用，但很少有正式的分析支持这种对政策和实践对科学进步的速度和方向的影响的理解。本研究的重点是开发和实施新的工具，用于定量分析科学政策干预对累积科学发现过程的影响。该分析通过利用项目评估文献中最新可用的详细引文数据和前沿方法扩展了先前的研究。该方法超越了在不同制度或政策环境中与知识相关的引文的传统横向比较；取而代之的是利用“自然实验”，在这种实验中，与特定知识相关的获取、传播或后续研究资助的条件随着时间的推移而变化。这种方法可以使制度和政策的作用在塑造科学进步的过程中从科学重要性的内在变化中解脱出来。具体而言，该研究概述了三种类型的工具：引用分析的差异方法，不同亚群中引用行为变化的明确比较，以及恢复政策干预影响“分布”的方法的发展。这些工具可以有效地应用于为一系列科学政策干预提供新颖的政策分析，从选择公共资助的水平（和限制）、管理获取科学研究材料和数据的规则，以及有关科学过程中发现的知识产权政策。特别是，这些工具允许评估科学政策对科学进步的速度和方向的干预，并允许评估政策举措的分配后果。这些工具有三种潜在的应用，包括：(a)知识产权对学术科学传播和使用的影响，(b)国家科学政策对干细胞研究的地理和分布的影响，以及(c)促进研究资源共享的机构对生命科学研究中知识积累动态的影响。总而言之，研究的产出将包括侧重于工具本身开发的论文，以及将这些工具应用于重点关注重要科学政策挑战的应用环境中的论文。这项研究将为：(a)科学政策分析提供信息，通过开发和实施能够评估具体政策和制度对科学活动的速度、方向和组成的影响的工具；(b)通过阐述支持经济增长的知识积累的微观经济和制度基础来研究科学经济学；(c)科学社会学，通过强调既存关系、地位和网络在科学界扩张中的作用，并解释科学系统特征与其增长之间的相互作用。更广泛地说，本研究的广泛影响是为一系列迄今为止难以定量分析的科学政策问题提供了一套工具，并为应用和适应前沿方法进行项目评估提供了一个新的领域。特别是，这项研究的结果将对科学经济学和社会学以及科学政策分析本身产生具体影响。此外，该研究还为项目评估文献中工具应用的潜在新领域提供了科学定量数据爆炸之间的桥梁。

While the cumulative nature of knowledge is recognized as central to economic growth, the microeconomic and institutional foundations of cumulativeness are less understood. Although "Open Science" is widely recognized to play a central role in the production and diffusion of fundamental knowledge, few formal analyses support this understanding of the impact of policies and practices on the rate and direction of scientific progress.This study focuses on the development and implementation of novel tools for quantitative analysis of the impact of science policy interventions on the process of cumulative scientific discovery. This analysis extends prior research by exploiting the recent availability of detailed citation data with frontier methods from the program evaluation literature. The approach moves beyond traditional cross-sectional comparisons of citations associated with knowledge in different institutional or policy environments; instead, "natural experiments" are utilized, where the conditions governing access, diffusion or follow-on research funding associated with a given piece of knowledge are changing over time. This approach allows the role of institutions and policy to be disentangled in shaping scientific progress from the intrinsic variation in scientific importance across discoveries. Specifically, the study outlines three types of tools: a differences-in-differences approach to citation analysis, the explicit comparison of changes in citation behavior in different subpopulations, and the development of an approach to recover the "distribution" of the impact of policy interventions. These tools can be fruitfully applied to provide novel policy analysis for a range of science policy interventions, from choices about the level of (and restrictions on) public funding, rules governing access to scientific research materials and data, and policies regarding intellectual property rights for discoveries resulting from the scientific process. In particular, the tools allow for the evaluation of science policy intervention on the rate and direction of scientific progress, and allows for the evaluation of the distributional consequences of policy initiatives. There are three potential applications of the tools in some detail, including (a) the impact of intellectual property rights on the diffusion and use of academic science, (b) the impact of national science policies on the geography and distribution of stem cell research, and (c) the impact of institutions that facilitate the sharing of research resources on the dynamics of knowledge accumulation in life sciences research. In sum, the outputs of the research will include papers that focus on the development of the tools per se, and papers that apply the tools in the context of applications focused on important science policy challenges. This study will inform: (a) science policy analysis, by developing and implementing tools that can assess the impact of specific policies and institutions on the rate, direction, and composition of scientific activities; (b) the study of the economics of science, by elaborating the microeconomic and institutional foundations of knowledge accumulation, which supports economic growth; and (c) the sociology of science, by highlighting the roles of preexisting relationships, status, and networks in the expansion of the scientific community and explaining interactions between the features of the scientific system and its growth.More generally, the broader impact of this study is to provide a set of tools for a range of science policy questions that have so far resisted quantitative analysis, and to offer a novel domain for the application and adaptation of frontier methods for program evaluation. In particular, the results of this research will have a specific impact in the economics and sociology of science, as well as in science policy analysis per se. In addition, the study provides a bridge between the explosion of quantitative data about science as a potential new area for the application of tools in the program evaluation literature.