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

虽然知识的累积性被认为是经济增长的核心，但累积性的微观经济基础和体制基础却鲜为人知。尽管“开放科学”在基础知识的产生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速度和方向的影响的理解。这项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。这一分析通过利用项目评估文献中的前沿方法利用最近详细的引文数据来扩展先前的研究。这种方法超越了传统的对不同机构或政策环境中与知识相关的引文的横向比较；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、传播或后续研究资金的条件正在随着时间的推移而变化。这种方法使机构和政策的作用能够从不同发现的科学重要性的内在差异中分离出来，形成科学进步。具体地说，这项研究概述了三种工具：引文分析的差异方法，明确比较不同亚群中引文行为的变化，以及制定一种方法来恢复政策干预影响的“分布”。这些工具可以卓有成效地用于为一系列科学政策干预措施提供新的政策分析，从关于公共资金水平(和限制)的选择，到关于获取科学研究材料和数据的规则，以及关于科学过程产生的发现的知识产权的政策。特别是，这些工具允许对科学政策干预措施的科学进步速度和方向进行评估，并允许评估政策举措的分配后果。这些工具有三个可能的应用细节，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地理和分布的影响；(C)促进共享研究资源的机构对生命科学研究中知识积累动态的影响。总而言之，研究的成果将包括侧重于工具本身开发的论文，以及在侧重于重大科学政策挑战的应用背景下应用工具的论文。这项研究将提供以下信息：(A)科学政策分析，开发和实施可评估具体政策和机构对科学活动的速度、方向和构成的影响的工具；(B)科学经济学研究，阐述支持经济增长的知识积累的微观经济和体制基础；以及(C)科学社会学，通过强调先前存在的关系、地位和网络在扩大科学界中的作用，并解释科学系统的特征与其增长之间的相互作用。更广泛地说，这项研究的更广泛的影响是为迄今为止拒绝定量分析的一系列科学政策问题提供一套工具，并为项目评估的前沿方法的应用和适应提供一个新的领域。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，这项研究提供了一座桥梁，将有关科学的定量数据作为一个潜在的新领域，在项目评估文献中应用工具。

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.