A tool called Funding the Frontier visualizes all the downstream impacts of funding — and predicts which studies will have the biggest societal impact.
Scientific research offers many benefits to society, but how do you trace the impact of specific projects? It’s easy to track which papers result from a grant, but much harder to follow how research has broader societal impacts on policies, medicines or products.
“Those are much more exciting [impacts], and provide greater public good,” says Dashun Wang, director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Read more in Nature.