What does it mean for scholarly fields to have an impact, and how do they compare?
Had a *great* conversation yesterday with my #Cornell colleague Yian Yin, who linked academic papers with government mentions, news mentions, and patents.
This chart from his research compares different fields in terms of these three outcomes
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01397-5
Large-scale quantitative studies like this are limited by the outcome measures they use, so it's not surprising that public value of art, history, and philosophy is under-estimated. I'll admit I was surprised to see psychology receive more citations in government and the news than economics.
I was also fascinated to see that computer scientists contribute waaay more to patents than to public discourse or policy conversations, which might be part of the problem in tech policy.
