text:
Irwin Feller
Senior Visiting Scientist, American Association for the Advancement of Science and Professor Emeritus, Economics, Pennsylvania State University
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.
-Baron William Thomson Kelvin.
When you can measure it, when you can express it in numbers, your knowledge is still of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.
-Jacob Viner
Performance measurement is a politically powerful but analytical diffuse concept. Its meanings and implementation can vary from forcing fundamental changes in the ways in which public sector organizations and assessed and thus public funds allocated, as evinced by recent state government initiatives across all levels of U.S. education, to constituting old wine in new bottles, especially to empirically oriented economists,
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Irwin Feller
Senior Visiting Scientist, American Association for the Advancement of
Science and Professor Emeritus, Economics, Pennsylvania State
I often say that when you can measure what you are
speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know
something about it; but when you cannot measure it,
when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge
is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the
beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your
thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the
matter may be.
-Baron William Thomson Kelvin.
When you can measure it, when you can express it in
numbers, your knowledge is still of a meager and
unsatisfactory kind.
-Jacob Viner
Performance measurement is a politically powerful but analytical
diffuse concept. Its meanings and implementation can vary from forcing
fundamental changes in the ways in which public sector organizations
and assessed and thus public funds allocated, as evinced by recent state
government initiatives across all levels of U.S. education, to constituting
old wine in new bottles, especially to empirically oriented economists,
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program evaluators and those weaned in the days of program-planning-
Addressing this analytical diffuseness, this paper assesses the
promises and limitations of performance measures as means of
measuring economic and other returns of the Federal government's
investments in basic and applied research. Referring to promises and
limitations in the same sentence implies differences in perspectives and
assessments about the relevance, reliability, validity, transparency, and
suitability of performance measures to guide decision making. These
differences exist. A stylized dichotomization is as follows:
• endorsement of requirements for, belief in, scholarly search
supportive of, and opportunistic provision of performance measures
that respond or cater to executive and legislative branch expectations
or hopes that such measures will facilitate evidence-based decision-
• research and experientially based assessment that even when well
done and used by adepts, performance measures at best provide
limited guidance for future expenditure decisions and at worst are
rife with potential for incorrect, faddish, chimerical, and
counterproductive decisions.
The tensions created by these differences are best captured by the
observation of Grover Cleveland, 22d and 24th President of the United
States: "It's a condition we confront — not a theory." The condition is
the set of Congressional and Executive requirements upon Federal
agencies to specify performance goals and to provide evidence,
preferably in quantitative form, that advances towards these goals have
been made. The set includes by now familiar legislation such as the
Government Performance and Results (GPRA) Act of 1993, the
Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010, and
requirements of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's
(ARRA) that Federal agencies provide evidence that their expenditures
under the Act have stimulated job creation. It also includes comparable
Executive branch directives. These include the Bush II Administration's
articulation in 2002 of R and D Investment Criteria , subsequent
implementation of these criteria by the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) via its Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART)
procedures, and the Obama Administration's 2009 OMB memorandum
on Science and Technology Priorities for the FY 2011 Budget, that states
that "Agencies should develop outcome-oriented goals for their science
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and technology activities…", and "… develop science of science policy"
tools that can improve management of their research and development
portfolios and better assess the impact of their science and technology
investments."To these formal requirements may be added recent and
likely increasing demands by congressional authorization and
appropriations committees that agencies produce quantitative evidence
that their activities have produced results, or impacts.
Theory here stands for a more complex, bifurcated situation,
creating what Manski has termed dueling certitudes: internally consistent
lines of policy analysis that lead to sharply contradictory predictions.
(Manski, 2010). One theoretical branch is the currently dominant new
public sector management paradigm branch. This paradigm emphasizes
strategic planning, accountability, measurement, and transparency across
all public sector functions, leading to, and requiring the use of evidence
as the basis for informed decision making (OECD, 2005; Kettl, 1997).
The second branch is the accumulated and emerging theoretical and
empirical body of knowledge on the dynamics of scientific inquiry and
the processes and channels by which public sector support of research
produces societal impacts. This body of knowledge performs a dual role.
Its findings undergird many of the conceptualizations and expectations
that policymakers have of the magnitude and characteristics of the
returns to public investments in research and of the ways in which these
returns can (or should) be measured. However, it is also a major source
of the cautions, caveats, and concerns expressed by agency personnel,
scientists, and large segments of the academic and science policy
research communities that efforts to formally employ performance
measures to measure public returns (of whatever form) to research and to
then tie support for research to such measures are overly optimistic, if
not chimerical, and rife with the potential for counterproductive and
perverse consequences.
It is in the context of these differing perspectives that this paper is
written. Its central thesis is that the promises and limitations of
performance impact measures as forms of evidence relate to the decision-
making context in which they are used. Context here means who is
asking what type of question(s) with respect to what type of decision(s)
and for what purpose(s). It also means the organizational characteristics
of the Federal agency—can the activities of its operators be observed,
and can the results of these activities be observed? (Wilson, 1989, pp.
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This emphasis on context produces a kaleidoscopic assessment,
such that promises and limitations change shape and hues as the decision
and organizational contexts shift. An emphasis on context also highlights
the analytical and policy risks of assessing the promises and limitations
of performance impact measures in terms of stylized characteristics.
Performance measures for example can be used for several different
purposes, such as monitoring, benchmarking, evaluation, foresight, and
advocacy (making a case) (Gault, 2010). Consistent with the STEP-
COSEPUP workshop's stated objective to provide expert guidance to
Federal policymakers in the Executive and Legislative branches about
what is known and what needs to be better known about how to assess
economic and other returns to Federal investments in science and
technology—the paper's focus is mainly on evaluation, although it
segues at times into the other functions.
Approached in this way, performance is a noun, not an adjective. It
also is a synonym for impact. This strict construction is made to separate
the following analysis from the larger, often looser language associated
with the topic in which performance is an adjective, as in the setting of
strategic or annual (performance) goals called for by GPRA; as an
indicator of current, changed or comparative (benchmarking) position, as
employed for example in the National Science Foundation's biennial
Science and Engineering Indicators reports; or as symptomatic measures
of the health/vitality/position of facets of the U.S. science, technology
and innovation enterprise, as represented for example in Rising Above
the Gathering Storm (2007), where they are employed as evidence that
things are amiss or deficient —a performance gap—in the state of the
The paper proceeds in a sequential, if accelerated manner. Section II
contains a brief literature review and an outline of the paper's bounded
scope. Section III presents a general discussion of the promises and
limitations of performance measures to assess the impacts of Federal
investments in research. Section IV illustrates the specific forms of the
promises and limitations of performance measures in the context of what
it terms the "big" and "small" questions in contemporary U.S. science
policy. Section V offers a personal, "bottom line" perspective on what all
this means.
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Analytical Framework and Scope
The paper's analytical framework and empirical findings derive
mainly from economics, although its coverage of performance measures
is broader than economic statistics and its treatment of impact assessment
is based mainly on precepts of evaluation design. The choice of
framework accords with the workshop's objective, which is suffused
with connotations of efficiency in resource allocation, or more
colloquially, seeking the highest possible returns on the public's
(taxpayer's) money. Adding to the appropriateness and relevance of the
chosen approach is that many of the arguments on behalf of Federal
investments in research, both basic and applied, draw upon economic
theories and findings. As Godin has noted, "We owe most of the
quantitative analysis of S and T to economists" (Godin, 2005, p. 3).
An immediate consequence of treating the workshop's objective in
this manner is that a goodly number of relevant and important subjects,
policy issues, and analytical frameworks are touched upon only briefly,
while others are ignored completely. Thus, only passing attention is
taken of the historical, institutional and political influences that in fact
have shaped and continue to shape the setting of U.S. national science
priorities and Federal R and D budgets, whether viewed in terms of
allocations by broad objectives, agencies, fields of science, or modes of
support. Moreover, interpreting the workshop's objective as a search for
measures related to allocative efficiency obviously sidesteps topics and
rich streams of research related to political influences on national
research priorities (e.g., Hedge and Mowery, 2010) or which generate
earmarks, set asides, and sheltered capacity building competitions that
palpably diverge from efficiency objectives (e.g., Savage, 1999; Payne,
2006). Likewise omitted are consideration of the normative goals
underlying Federal support of research and the distributive effects or
societal impacts that flow from it (Bozeman and Sarewitz, 2011).
Another consequence is that the paper is primarily about
performance measurement as a generic approach rather than about the
reliability and validity of specific measures. Where reference is made to
specific measures, it is to illustrate larger themes. In fact, there is no
shortage of "metrics", in GPRA-speak- to measure the outputs and
outcomes of Federal investments in research. Geisler (2000; pps. 254-
255) offers a well presented catalogue of 37 "core" metrics. These are
organized in terms of immediate outputs (e.g., number of publications in
refereed journals; number of patents); intermediate outputs (e.g., number
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of improved or new products produced; cost reductions from new and
improved products/processes); pre-ultimate outputs (e.g., savings, cost
reductions, and income generated by improved health, productivity,
safety, and mobility of the workshop at sectoral and national levels); and
ultimate outputs (e.g., improved GDP/capital; improved level of overall
satisfaction and happiness of population.) The list is readily expanded to
include combinations of single indicators, new data sets that permit
disaggregation of existing measures, and new and improved versions of
mainstream measures–the rapid and seemingly accelerating move from
publication counts to citation measures to impact factors to h-indices and
beyond being one such example.
Also in abundance are various scorecards or rankings based on
assemblages and weightings of any number of performance measures
related to scientific advance, technological advance, competitiveness,
innovativeness, university performance, STEM-based educational
proficiency and the like that have been used to position US performance
within international hierarchies or norms. Indicator construction for
science and technology has become a profession in its own stead, with
regular international conferences—The European Network of Indicators
Designers will hold its 2011 Science and Technology Indicators
Conference in Rome, Italy, in September, 2011— and a well recognized
set of journals in which new work is published.
Plentiful too and continuously being updated are compendia and
manuals covering international best practice on how to evaluate public
sector R and D programs. These works cover a wide range of
performance impact measures and methodologies, including benefit-cost
analysis, patent analysis, network analysis, bibliometrics, historical
tracings, innovation and on the outputs produced by several different
Federal agencies—health, energy, agriculture, environmental protection,
international competitiveness, employment. (For recent overviews, see
Wagner and Flanagan, 1995; Ruegg and Feller, 2003; Godin, 2005, chpt.
15; Kanninen and Lemola, 2006; Grant, et.al, 2009; Foray, 2009; Gault,
2010; Link and Scott, 2011).
Finally, in setting expectations for the workshop, it is perhaps
helpful to note that the topics and issues to be discussed are not new
ones. Rather, they form the substance of at least 60 years of theoretical,
empirical and interpretative work, producing what by now must be a five
foot high stack of reports and workshop proceedings, including a
sizeable number originating under National Academies' auspices. The
recurrent themes addressed in this previous work, evident since the
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program-planning-budgeting initiatives of the 1960s and continuing on
through its several variants, are a search for decision algorithms that will
lead to the improvement in government budgeting and operations and a
search for criteria for setting priorities for science (Shils, 1969). Noting
these antecedents is not intended to diminish the importance of current
activities (nor, for that matter, of this paper). Instead, it is to suggest the
complexities of the issues under consideration and as a reminder of the
richness and contemporary relevance of much that has been written
Performance Impact Measures
Differences in assessments about the potential positive and negative
features of requiring strategic plans and performance measures into how
Federal agencies set research priorities and assessed performance were
visible at the time of GPRA's enactment. They continue to this day.1
In 1994, almost immediately after GPRA's passage, I organized a
session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's
(AAAS) Colloquium on Science and Technology Policy on the
applicability of GPRA to budgeting for science and technology. Taking a
"neutral" stand on the subject, I invited, among other panelists, Robert
Behn, a leading scholar of and advocate for the new public management
paradigm subsumed within GPRA and like requirements, and Paul
David, a leading researcher in the economics of science and technology.
The title of Behn's talk captured its essence: "Here Comes
Performance Assessment-And it Might Even be Good for You." (Behn,
A natural experiment occurring on February 15-16, 2011 highlights the
continuing character of these differing perspectives. OSTP's release on
February 10, 2011 of its R and D Dashboard, that contains data about NIH and
NSF R and D awards to research institutions and "links those inputs to
outputs—specifically publications, patent applications, and patents produced by
researchers funded by those investments"– produced an immediate flurry of
comments and exchanges on SciSIP's list server. Most of this exchange
contained the point-counterpoint themes in the Behn-David exchange cited
above, as well as those recounted in this paper. Among these were: how were
outcomes defined? could they be measured? is there reasonable consensus on
what they are? One rejoinder to these comments raised in response to specific
reservations about the meaningfulness of patent data was that when Congress
asks what are we getting from these billions spent on R and D, it is helpful to
have patent number to point to as one outcome of the nation's investment.
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1994). Among the several benefits (or promises) cited by Behn were the
Having objectives ("knowing where you want to go") is
helpful;Objectives provide useful baseline for assessing each of 4
modalities of accountability–finance, equity, use of power and
Well defined objectives and documentation of results facilitate
communication with funders, performers, users, and others.
For his part, David outlined what he termed "very serious
problems…with outcome goal setting for federal programs in general
and for research in particular" (David, 1994, p. 294). David's central
argument was that an "outcome reporting may have a perverse effect of
distorting the perception of the system of science and technology and its
relationship to economic growth" (ibid, p. 297). He further observed that
" Agencies should define appropriate output and outcome measures for
all R and D programs, but agencies should not expect fundamental basic
research to be able to identify outcomes and measure performance in the
same way that applied research or development are able to."
What follows is essentially an expanded exposition of these two
perspectives, presented first as promises and then as limitations.
• Performance measurement is a (necessary) means towards
implementing (and enforcing) the audit precepts – especially those
linked to accountability and transparency–contained within GPRA
and like requirements.
• Performance measures can assist agencies make improved, evidence-
based decisions both for purposes of program design and operations
(formative evaluations) and longer term assessments of allocative
and distributive impacts ( summative evaluations). In these ways,
performance measures assist agencies in formulating more clearly
defined, realistic, and relevant strategic objectives and in better
adjusting ongoing program operations to program objectives.
• Well defined, readily measured, and easily communicated
performance measures aids both funders and performers to
communicate the accomplishments and contributions of the public
investments to larger constituencies, thereby maintaining and
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strengthening the basis of long term public support of these
• The search for measures that accurately depict what an
agency/program has accomplished may serve as a focusing device,
guiding attention to the shortcomings of existing data sets and thus to
investments in obtaining improved data.
• Performance measurement focuses attention on the end objectives of
public policy, on what has happened or happening outside the black
box, rather than on the churning of processes and relationships inside
the black box. This interior churning produces intermediate outputs
and outcomes (e.g., papers, patents) that may be valued by
performers (or their institutions, stakeholders, or local
representatives), but these outputs and outcomes do not necessarily
connect in a timely, effective, or efficient manner to the goals that
legitimize and galvanize public support.
• Requiring agencies to set forth explicit performance research goals
that can be vetted for their societal importance and to then document
that their activities produced results commensurate with these goals
rather than some diminished or alternative set of outputs and
outcomes is a safeguard against complacency on the part of funders
and performers that what might have been true, or worked in the
past, is not necessarily the case today, or tomorrow. Jones, for
example, has recently noted, "Given that science is change, one may
generally imagine that the institutions that are efficient in supporting
science at one point in time may be less appropriate at a later point in
time and that science policy, like science itself, must evolve and
continually be retuned" (Jones, 2010, p. 3). Measurement of impacts
is one means of systematically attending to the consequences of this
• Performance measurement is a potential prophylactic against the
episodic cold fusion-type viruses that have beset the formulation of
U.S. science policy. As illustrated by the continuing debates set off
by Birch's claims on the disproportionate role of small firms as
sources of job creation (cf. Haltiwanger, J., R. Jarmin, and J.
Miranda (2010)) or the challenge posed to the reflexive proposition
that the single investigator mode of support is the single best way to
foster creative science by Borner, et.al. findings that "Teams
increasingly dominate solo scientists in the product of high-impact,
highly cited science; (Borner, et. al. 2010, p. 1), U.S. science and
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innovation policy contains several examples of Will Roger's
observation that, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble,
it's what we know that ain't so."
• Presented as a method of assessing returns to Federal investments in
research, performance measurement provides policymakers and
performers with an expanded, more flexible and adaptable set of
measures than implied by rate of return or equivalent benefit-cost
calculations. Criticism of what is seen as undue reliance on these
latter approaches is longstanding; they are based in part on technical
matters, especially in the monetization of non-market outputs, but
also on the distance between the form that an agency's research
output may take and the form needed for this output to have market
or other societal impacts.
The largest promise of performance measurement, though, likely
arises not from recitation of the maxims of the new public management
but from the intellectual ferment now underway in developing new and
improved data on the internal processes of scientific and technological
research, the interrelationships of variables within the black box, and
improved methods for assembling, distilling and presenting data. Much
of this ferment, of course, relates to Dr. Marburger's call for a new
science of science policy, the activities of the National Science and
Technology Committee's (NSTC) Committee on Science, and the
research currently being supported by the National Science Foundation's
Science of Science and Innovation Policy program (SciSIP). No attempt
is made here to present a full précis of the work underway (Lane, 2010).
Having been a co-organizer, along with Al Teich, of two AAAS
workshops at which SciSIP grantees presented their preliminary findings
and interacted with Federal agency personnel, however, it is a
professional pleasure to predict that a substantial replenishment and
modernization of the intellectual capital underlying existing Federal
research policies and investments can be expected.
To illustrate though the nature of recent advances, I cite two
developments non-randomly selected to reflect the focus of my own
research interests. They are the NSF's Business R and D and Innovation
Survey (BRDIS), itself in part redesigned in response to the 2005 NRC
study, Measuring Research and Development Expenditures in the U.S.
Economy, and advances in the visualization of the (bibliometric)
interconnections of disciplines. The NRC report articulated longstanding
concerns that NSF's existing survey of industrial R and D needed
methodological upgrading, lagged behind the structure of the U.S.
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economy in not adequately covering the growth of the service sector or
the internationalization of sources and performers of R and D, and did
not adequately connect R and D expenditures with downstream "impact"
measures, such as innovations. The result has been a major revision of
these surveys, undertaken by NSF's Science Resources Statistics
Early findings from the new BRDIS survey on the sources and
characteristics of industrial innovation fill a long recognized data gap in
our understanding of relationships between and among several variables,
including private and public R and D expenditures, firm size and
industrial structure, human capital formation and mobility, and
managerial strategies. (Boroush, 2010). Combined with pending findings
from a number of ongoing SciSIP projects and juxtaposed to and
compared with data available from ongoing international surveys, these
newly available data hold promise of simultaneously providing
policymakers with a finer grained assessment of the comparative and
competitive position of the technological performance of the U.S.
economy and researchers and evaluators finer grained data to assess the
impacts of selected science and technology program and test existing and
emerging theories.
Science is a set of interconnected, increasingly converging
disciplines, so run the claims of many scientists (Sharp, et. al, 2011). But
precisely in what ways and with what force do these interconnections
flow? Does each field influence all other fields and with equal force, or
are there discernible, predictable differences in patterns of connection
and influence? Prospectively, being able to answer these questions would
provide policymakers with evidence about relative priorities in funding
fields of science, presumably giving highest priority to those that served
as hubs from which other fields drew intellectual energy. Recent research
in data visualization, illustrated by Boyack, Klavans, and Borner's
Mapping the Backbone of Science (2005), combines bibliometric
techniques, network theories, and data visualization techniques to offer
increasingly accessible "maps" of the structure of the natural and social
sciences, thereby providing one type of answer to these questions.
The above noted emphasis on context surfaces immediately in
considering the limitations of performance measurement. Perhaps the
most obvious and important difference in the use of such measures in
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all these proposals could be funded, what means should be used to select
from among them? What measures of performance/output/outcomes
should be used to assess past performance in determining-out year
investments or near-term R and D priorities. Exciting as it may be to
envision the prospects of societal impacts flowing from frontier, high-
risk, transformative risk, it serves only to bring one full circle back to the
policymaker's priority setting and resource allocation questions noted
The same issues arise when trying to compute the proper level of
support or estimate the returns to public investments for functional
objectives, agencies, and fields of science. An impressive body of
research, for example, exists on the contributions to the health status of
the American population produced by Federal investments in biomedical
research. It's an analytical and empirical stretch to say that this research
provides evidence that can be used to determine whether current or
proposed levels of appropriation for NIH are right, too little, or too high.
No evident empirical basis existed for the doubling of NIH's budget over
a 5-year time period, and the consequences now observed while
unintended were not unpredictable (Freeman and van Reenan, 2008). At
issue here is what Sarawitz had termed the myth of infinite benefits: "If
more science and technology are important to the well-being of society,
then the more science and technology society has, the better off it will
be" (1996; p. 18). Indeed, arguably, if the budget decision had any
lasting impacts, it was to elevate "balance" of funding across agencies as
a resource allocation criteria and to set doubling as a formulaic target for
other science oriented agencies.
Similar problems arise too in attempting to formulate analytically
consistent criteria based on performance measures for allocating funds
among fields of science and technology, — how much for chemistry?;
physics?; economics?- especially as among national objectives and
agencies, as well as within agencies. These are the perennial practical
questions across the spectrum of Federal science policymakers, yet
perhaps with the exception of basing program level allocations on
estimated returns from impacts, as in the cases of agriculture (Ruttan,
19820 and health (Gross, Anderson, and Power, 1999) for which few
good answers, or funding algorithms, exist. For example, a recent NRC
panel tasked with just such an assignment concluded in its report, A
Strategy for Assessing Science, "No theory exists that can reliability
predict which research activities are most likely to lead to scientific
advances or to societal benefits" (2007, p. 89).
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One would like to do better than this. Here, if anywhere, is where
performance measurement may have a role. The challenge at this point is
not the absence of performance measures relating Federal investments in
research to specific outputs or studies pointing to high social rates of
return within functional areas but the sheer number of them and the
variations in methodologies that produce them. The result is a portfolio
of options about performance measures, each more precisely calibrated
over time but still requiring the decision maker to set priorities among
end objectives.
Thus, the Boyack, et. al, bibliometric study cited above highlights
the "centrality" of biochemistry among published papers. Using this
study and its implied emphasis on scientific impact as a basis for
resource allocation decisions among scientific fields would presumably
lead to increased relative support for biochemistry. If one instead turns to
the Cohen-Nelson-Walsh survey-based study (2002) of the contributions
of university and government laboratory research i.e., ("public")
research to industrial innovation, which contains an implied policy
emphasis on economic competitiveness, one finds both considerable
variation across industries in the importance of public research and
variations in which fields of public research are cited as making a
contribution. An overall finding though is that, "As may be expected,
more respondents consider research in the engineering fields to
contribute importantly to their R and D than research in the basic
sciences, except for chemistry" (2002, p. 10). The authors however mute
this distinction of the relative contribution of fields of science with the
caution that "the greater importance of more applied fields does not
mean that basic science has little impact, but that its impact may be
mediated through the more applied sciences or through the application of
industrial technologists' and scientists' basic scientific training to the
routine challenges of conducting R and D" (p. 21). But the upshot of the
study still would seem to be the need for increased (relative) support of
engineering related disciplines. Advocates for increased Federal research
for computer science and engineering, for their part may turn to
Jorgenson, Ho, and Samuels' recent estimates of the contribution of the
computer equipment manufacturing industry to the growth in US
productivity between 1960-2007 (Jorgenson, Ho, and Samuels, 2010).
An obvious conclusion, indeed the standard one in discussion of this
issue, is that the interconnectedness of fields of science requires that each
be supported. And this of course is how the present U.S. system
functions. There are considerable differences, however, between funding
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each field according to its deeds and each according to its needs.
Moreover, the interconnectedness argument applies to historical
determinants and levels of support; it is of limited guidance in informing
budget decision—show much more or less, given existing levels of
Little of this should be a surprise. The gap between estimates of
returns to public investments in research and using these estimates to
formulate budget allocations among missions, agencies, and disciplines
was identified by Mansfield in the opening text of the social returns to R
and D. Referring to the number of independent studies working from
different models and different data bases that have pointed to very higher
social rates of return, he noted, "But it is evident that these studies can
provide very limited guidance to the Office of Management and Budget
or to the Congress regarding many pressing issues. Because they are
retrospective, they shed little light on current resource allocation
decisions, since these decisions depend on the benefits and costs of
proposed projects, not those completed in the past" (Mansfield, 1991, p.
26). The gap has yet to be closed.
Similar issues arise in using bibliometric data to allocate resources
across fields. Over the last three decades, even as the U.S. position in the
life sciences has remained strong, its world share of engineering papers
has been cut almost in half, from 38 percent in 1981 to 21 percent in
2009, placing it below the share (33 percent) for the EU27. Similar
declines in world share are noted for mathematics, physics, and
chemistry (National Science Foundation, 2007; Adams and Pendlebury,
2010). One immediate, and simple interpretation of these data is that
aggregate bibliometric performance is a function of resource allocation: a
nation gets what it funds. But this formulation begs first the question if
what it is producing is what it most needs, and then if what it is
producing is being produced in the most efficient manner.
Having studied, written about, participated in, organized workshops
on, and as an academic research administrator been affected by the use of
performance measures, something more than an "on the one hand/on the
other hand" balance sheet, a concluding section seems in order.
It's simpler to start with the limitations of performance measures for
they are real. These include the attempt to reduce assessment of complex,
diverse, and circuitously generated outcomes, themselves often
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dependent on the actions of agents outside the control of Federal
agencies, to single or artificially aggregated measures; the substitution of
bureaucratically and/or ideologically driven specification and utilization
of selective measures for the independent judgment of experts; and the
distortion of incentives for science managers and scientists that reduces
the overall performance of public investments. To all these limitations
must be added that to date there is little publically verifiable evidence
outside the workings of OMB-agency negotiations that implementation
of a system of performance measurement has appreciably improved
decision making with respect to the magnitude or allocation of Federal
research funds. When joined with reservations expressed by both
scholars and practitioners about the impacts of the new public
management paradigm, it produces assessments of the type, "Much of
what has been devised in the name of accountability actually interferes
with the responsibilities that individuals in organizations have to carry
out work and to accomplish what they have been asked to do" (Radin,
2006, p.7; also Perrin, 1998; Feller, 2002; Weingert, 2005; Auranen and
Niemien, 2010).
The promises, too, are likely to be real if and when they are realized.
One takes here as a base the benefits contained in Behn's presentation
and the section on promises above. Atop this base are to be added the
revised and new, expanded, disaggregated, and manipulable data sets
emerging both from recent Federal science of science policy initiatives
and other ongoing research (Lane and Bertuzzi, 2011). Thus, Sumell,
Stephan, and Adams' recent research on the locational decisions on new
Ph.D.s working in industry accords with and provides an empirical base
for the recent calls by the National Science Foundation's Advisory
Committee for GPRA Performance Assessment 2008 to collect and
provide data on the "development of people" as an impact of agency
A different category of benefits owing less to improved public
sector management practices and more to the realities of science policy
decision making needs to be added to this list. The very same arguments
cited above that the links between initial Federal investments in research
are too long term and circuitous to precisely specify in GPRA or OMB
planning or budget formats serves to increase the value for intermediate
measures. For policymakers operating in real time horizons, even
extending beyond the next election cycle, performance measures of the
type referred to above are likely as good as they are to get. We live in a
second best world. Although it may be analytically and empirically
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correct to state say that none of the proximate intermediate output
measures, patents or publications for example, are good predictors of the
ultimate impacts that one is seeking–increased per capita income,
improved health–some such measures are essential to informed decision
Adding impetus to this line of reasoning is that the environment in
which U.S. science policy is made is a globally competitive one, which
increases the risks of falling behind rivals. Akin to an arms race or
advertising in imperfectly competitive markets, support of research is
necessary to maintain market share, even if the information on which
decisions are made is imperfect.
Finally, as an empirically oriented economist whose work at various
times has involved generating original data series of patents and
publications and use of a goodly portion of the performance measures
and methodologies now in vogue in evaluations of Federal and State
science and technology programs, there is a sense of déjà vu to much of
the debate about the promises and limitations of performance measures
of impacts. The temptation is to observe somewhat like Monsieur Jordain
in Moliere's play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, "Good heavens! For
more than forty years I have been doing performance measurement
without knowing it."
Performance measures viewed either or both as a method for
explicating needs assessments or conducting impact assessments are
basic, indispensible elements in policy making, program evaluation, and
scholarly research. What are open to issue are:
• the specification of the appropriate measures for the decision(s)
under review– a complex task involving technical, political, and
normative considerations;
• the proper interpretation and incorporation of existing and newly
developed data and measures used in retrospective assessments of
performance into decisions relating to estimating the prospective
returns from alternative future Federal investments in research–
decisions made within a penumbra of scientific, technical, economic,
and societal uncertainties that performance measures reduce but do
not eliminate; and
• providing evidence that use of performance measures as forms of
evidence in fact improves the efficiency or rate(s) of return to
Federal investments in research.
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Given the above recitation of promises and limitations, the optimal
course of action seems to be what Feuer and Maranto have termed
science advice as procedural rationality (2010). It is to (1) have
policymakers employ performance impact measures that correspond to
what is known or being learned about how public investments in basic
and applied science relate to the attainment of given societal objectives;
(2) have the body of existing and emerging knowledge of how Federal in
basic and applied research impact on societal objectives connect to the
form of the decisions that policymakers are called upon to make; and (3)
use gaps that may exist between (1) and (2) to make explicit the nature of
the limits to which theory-based/evidence-based knowledge can
contribute to informed decision making (Aghion, David, and Foray,
2009). Viewed in terms of preventing worse case outcomes, the objective
should be to avoid the pell-mell drive now in vogue in State governments
towards formula shaped coupling of performance measures and budgets,
a trend as applied to Federal funding of research that is fraught with the
risks of spawning the limitations described above.
To the extent that the STEP-COSEPUP workshop contributes to
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