About Star Metrics®
STAR METRICS® Overview
STAR METRICS® is a federal effort to create a repository of data and tools that will be useful to assess the impact of federal R&D investments. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), under the auspices of Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), are leading this project with funding provided by NIH, NSF, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Through the Federal RePORTER tool, we are developing an open and automated data infrastructure that will enable the documentation and analysis of inputs, outputs, and outcomes resulting from federal investments in science.
If you have questions or feedback you would like to provide, please contact:
Brian Haugen, Ph.D.
Office of Data Analysis Tools and Systems
Office of Extramural Research
National Institutes of Health
Brian.Haugen@nih.gov
STAR METRICS® Project Beginnings
People have asked important questions about the impact of federal investments in science, particularly with respect to job creation and economic growth. It is important to collect and analyze data so that such questions can be answered in a credible fashion. There is currently no data infrastructure that systematically couples science funding with outcomes. There are also no mechanisms that currently exist to engage the public with scientific funding.
However, there are obvious ways to leverage existing data. Federal agencies already collect data on federal investments at the individual, award, and institutional levels for the purposes of managing awards. Academic researchers have collected large bodies of data on such scientific and innovation outcomes as citations, patents, business startups and IPOs. Finally, there has been substantial investment in visualization and other tools that convey complex information about science to a lay audience. The existence of these and other resources motivates the STAR METRICS® approach to studying the impact of science funding and disseminating the information to the public.
The STAR METRICS® project is anticipated to be a broad collaboration of federal science and technology funding agencies with a shared vision of developing data infrastructures and products to support evidence-based analyses of the impact of science and technology investment. The goal of the STAR METRICS® project is to utilize existing administrative data from federal agencies and match them with existing research databases on economic, scientific and social outcomes.
STAR METRICS® was created in direct response to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) request that federal agencies develop outcome-oriented goals for their science and technology activities. It was also in direct response to the reporting requirements of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and aims to provide American taxpayers with precise information on the value of their investments.
