If you ask most people whether science is a public good, I suspect most would argue that it was, yet the output of scientists’ efforts can often be hard to ascertain, much less quite how the public benefits from it.

Of course, a big part of the challenge is that it’s incredibly difficult to quantify the value of scientific research, but that’s what a new paper from the Kellogg School aims to do.

Public benefit

The researchers examined scientific publications from across all major disciplines before using news media, patent data, and government documents to understand how the science was being used by the public.

They utilized five large datasets that aim to connect scientific publications with both the funding support they receive and the public use they’re ultimately put to. In total, they analyzed millions of scientific papers that were funded by the US government between 2005 and 2014.

They were particularly interested in three areas of public use: mentions in patents; mentions in the mainstream media; and mentions in federal government documents. These were designed to cover their implications in terms of policy, broader public interest, and technological application respectively.

The analysis showed that there was a pretty strong link between scientific research and ultimate public use. What’s more, the funding given to science was strongly correlated with the public use of the research. For instance, the researchers found that the fields of computer science that received the most funding were also those most likely to be cited in future patents.

Varied benefits

Suffice to say there appear to be differential uses of scientific results in each of the three public domains. For instance, in areas like computer science or maths, it was far more likely that results would be applied to patents than in policymaking.

In social sciences, however, they were far more likely to appear in media and policymaking than they were in patents. Indeed, the only domain that crossed all three domains was biology.

What’s more, after examining the return on investment of scientific research, the authors found that there was a strong association between the level of public funding and the ultimate use of the science by the public, which strongly suggests a good return on investment is achieved.

As such, the suggestion that science is largely disconnected from the general public and doesn’t provide sufficient direct benefits to society is largely unfounded. Indeed, the connection might actually be much greater than we previously thought.