Quantifying advances from basic research to applied research in material science

Abstract

Exploring the connection between basic science and its practical applications is critical to consider the social justification of the substantial governmental investments in science. However, there's a limited understanding of global research patterns and the dynamics of researcher collaboration from a basic-applied perspective because such studies have been mainly focused only on the biomedical field. Here, the main goal is to propose an indicator to quantify the degree of basic-applied research in academic papers. Using the indicator, we uncover how material science has advanced from basic to applied research, based on the international trends of the indicators and the affiliations of the scientists involved. We develop a methodology that indexes levels of advancement from basic research to applied research based on large-scale text data. The continuous scores assigned to each paper are derived from a vector space embedding technical terms from a broad network data. These scores align with experts' views in material science. This methodology enables us to monitor international trends that China has significantly advanced into applied research, as well as Chinese applied scientists increasingly associating with their domestic institutions. As science and technology implication, our methodology extends the boundary of assessing scientific research on its proximity to real-world applications and provides a tangible measure for funding agencies managing to fund or design research environments.