Today’s research enterprise is growing increasingly more international, interdisciplinary, and interconnected with other societal sectors. Research increasingly integrates knowledge and tools from the life sciences, the physical sciences, engineering, and other fields. Our titles explore the changing research enterprise, including ethical issues in research, scientific research workflows, best practices for open science to spur research and innovation, and how best to support and prepare the next generation of scientists.
Genetic and genomic information has become far more accessible, and research using human genetic data has grown exponentially over the past decade. Genetics and genomics research is now being conducted by a wide range of investigators across disciplines, who often use population descriptors …[more]
Automated Research Workflows for Accelerated Discovery: Closing the Knowledge Discovery Loop
The needs and demands placed on science to address a range of urgent problems are growing. The world is faced with complex, interrelated challenges in which the way forward lies hidden or dispersed across disciplines and organizations. For centuries, scientific research has progressed through …[more]
Fostering Responsible Computing Research: Foundations and Practices
With computing technologies increasingly woven into our society and infrastructure, it is vital for the computing research community to be able to address the ethical and societal challenges that can arise from the development of these technologies, from the erosion of personal privacy to the …[more]
The United States has long made substantial investments in clinical research with the goal of improving the health and well-being of our nation. There is no doubt that these investments have contributed significantly to treating and preventing disease and extending human life. Nevertheless, …[more]
Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences: Accelerating Research and the Spread of Knowledge
New research in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and other fields is published every day, but the gap between what is known and the capacity to act on that knowledge has never been larger. Scholars and nonscholars alike face the problem of how to organize knowledge and to integrate …[more]
Measuring Sex, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation
Sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation are key indicators of the demographic diversity in the United States. Sex and gender are often conflated under the assumptions that they are mutually determined and do not differ from each other; however, the growing visibility of transgender and …[more]
Biological physics, or the physics of living systems, has emerged fully as a field of physics, alongside more traditional fields of astrophysics and cosmology, atomic, molecular and optical physics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, particle physics, and plasma physics. This new field …[more]
The Endless Frontier: The Next 75 Years in Science
The National Academy of Sciences hosted a symposium on February 26, 2020, that gathered top business, academic, and government leaders to explore whether the modern research architecture that fuels U.S. innovation needs to be reconfigured to meet the challenges of our time. The event was held in …[more]
Reproducibility and Replicability in Science
One of the pathways by which the scientific community confirms the validity of a new scientific discovery is by repeating the research that produced it. When a scientific effort fails to independently confirm the computations or results of a previous study, some fear that it may be a symptom of …[more]
Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research
Openness and sharing of information are fundamental to the progress of science and to the effective functioning of the research enterprise. The advent of scientific journals in the 17th century helped power the Scientific Revolution by allowing researchers to communicate across time and space, …[more]
Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science
The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research. The growing scale of science has been accompanied by a shift toward collaborative research, referred to as “team science.” Scientific research is increasingly conducted by small teams and …[more]
Convergence of the life sciences with fields including physical, chemical, mathematical, computational, engineering, and social sciences is a key strategy to tackle complex challenges and achieve new and innovative solutions. However, institutions face a lack of guidance on how to establish …[more]
