Science Policy Research Report: Metrics for Evaluating Big Science

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Big Science programs such as the International Space Station or the Large Hadron Collider expensive and their true worth is fully realized only after years or decades. The high cost of sustaining these programs often crowds out other scientific research. To address this challenge, this project reviews mechanisms to gauge the future productivity of Big Science projects. The analysis will identify waypoint mechanisms and assess their predictive power. This research will give government agencies and the scientific community an overview of tools for understanding how best to evaluate and manage Big Science projects, thereby increasing the efficient use of public and private dollars to advance scientific progress. Survey results of program directors at NSF, DOE, NASA, and NIH characterize current best-practices for making interim assessments of infrastructure-heavy research programs. New candidate waypoints are developed, and tested by analyzing the scientific research supported by the International Space Station. The quantitative analyses will control for a host of project-specific factors such as the sub-discipline of the research, the background and characteristics of the principal investigator, and the initial funding date to ascertain the degree to which candidate waypoints provide statistical rigor to predict the eventual attainment of valued outcomes.