Research Impact Quantification

A method was developed to quantify the impacts of research. The method is able to identify indirect impacts of research, and the pathways through which they are disseminated. A fully connected network is constructed whose nodes represent research, technology, and mission areas. The total impact of a given research node on any other node is the sum of the impacts (link value products) along every path in the network, and includes research-research, research-technology, and technology-research impacts. A pilot study was performed using a taxonomy of research and development nodes, with the raw input data (the link values) obtained from a survey of experts. An algorithm processed the data to provide total impact results, which are presented here.