This $575,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program will fund the development of a data-driven framework for studying scientific consensus and debate. Over a three-year period from August 2022 to July 2025, researchers at Northeastern University will create a corpus of exemplar scientific debates by analyzing millions of published documents. They will then develop and validate quantitative indicators of debate at the topic level, leveraging techniques applied to publication metadata, citation linkages, and full text. The most successful indicators will be combined into a model to infer a singular debate score for research topics. This will facilitate the first empirical study of debate incidence and consensus evolution across all of science. Additionally, the researchers will apply these new indicators to questions around the COVID-19 pandemic's impacts on science, including the role of consensus in knowledge dissemination and incidence of misinformation. The project aims to establish a foundation for the new science of scientific debate and demonstrate its policy relevance.
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