Executive Summary
This paper addresses the field’s engagement with the institutions whose decisions shape the distribution of scholarly attention: funding agencies, learned societies, journals, university administrations, government science advisory bodies, and international scientific organizations. The engagement is unavoidable because the field’s applied dimension depends on its findings reaching the bodies that can act on them, and it is fraught because those bodies are the same ones whose attention patterns the field exists to examine. The paper develops a strategy for engagement that allows the field to be useful to research-governing institutions without losing the analytical independence on which its value to those institutions depends.
The paper develops six arguments. The first is that engagement with research-governing institutions is intrinsic to the field’s mission rather than incidental to it, and that the engagement must be planned and supported with the same seriousness as the field’s scholarly work. The second is that funding agencies are the field’s primary interlocutors and that the engagement with them must address several specific functions — portfolio review, priority-setting consultation, embedded analysis — each of which has its own institutional dynamics. The third is that engagement with learned societies and journals operates through different mechanisms and addresses different aspects of the attention problem. The fourth is that engagement with university administrations is necessary for the institutional changes that affect what kinds of scholarship are professionally rewarded, and that this engagement is among the slowest of the field’s applied activities to produce visible results. The fifth is that engagement with government science advisory bodies and parliamentary committees provides the highest-leverage opportunities the field will have, but also carries the highest risks of co-optation and political entanglement. The sixth is that international scientific organizations and cross-border coordination require the field to develop capacities that the early founding years will not fully support, and that the international agenda should accordingly be paced realistically.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the independence problem — the central tension that engagement creates between usefulness to research-governing institutions and analytical credibility about them — and with concrete proposals for the institutional structures that can manage the tension.
1. Introduction
The preceding papers have specified the field’s conceptual framework, methodological standards, academic infrastructure, funding strategy, data resources, and workforce. All of this presupposes that the field’s outputs will reach audiences who can act on them. The audiences include other scholars, who can build on the field’s findings in their own work, and the broader public, which Paper 8 will address. The audiences also include the research-governing institutions whose decisions shape the distribution of scholarly attention, and the engagement with those institutions is the subject of this paper.
The engagement is intrinsic to the field’s mission for three reasons. The first is that the field’s conceptual framework — the identification of cases in which attention has been misallocated — implicitly contains a prescription, since to say that attention has been misallocated is to say that the allocation should be changed. The prescription cannot be acted on without engagement with the institutions that make allocation decisions. The second is that the field’s data depend in substantial part on the cooperation of research-governing institutions, particularly for the analysis of funding decisions, of journal-acceptance patterns, and of institutional-priority decisions. The cooperation is more likely when the institutions see the field as a productive partner rather than as an outside critic. The third is that the field’s professional development requires the recognition of its outputs by the institutions that shape scholarly careers, and the recognition comes through engagement.
The engagement is fraught for the corresponding reasons. The institutions whose decisions the field studies are the same ones whose cooperation the field requires for its data, whose funding the field needs for its work, and whose recognition the field needs for its scholars’ careers. The asymmetry creates pressures toward producing findings that the institutions can accept, toward avoiding criticisms that might damage cooperation, and toward narrowing the field’s work to topics that the institutions find comfortable. The pressures are real, they have damaged the analytical independence of adjacent fields, and the field’s engagement strategy must include explicit structural protections against them.
The argument of this paper is that the tension between engagement and independence cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed. The management depends on institutional structures that maintain the field’s analytical independence as a non-negotiable commitment, on professional norms that reward uncomfortable findings rather than punishing them, and on engagement practices that approach research-governing institutions as collaborators in a shared project rather than as patrons whose preferences must be accommodated. The paper develops the argument through the specific engagement domains and concludes with the institutional structures that the strategy requires.
2. Funding Agencies
Funding agencies are the field’s primary interlocutors among research-governing institutions because their decisions affect the distribution of attention more directly than any other set of decisions in the research system. A scholar can pursue an unfashionable question without institutional support if their resources allow it, but the work that requires substantial funding — empirical projects with real-world data, projects requiring trained research staff, projects requiring specialized infrastructure — depends on funding-agency decisions in ways that scholarly effort alone cannot overcome. The funding agencies’ priorities shape what kinds of work get done, by whom, and at what scale, and the field’s engagement with them is accordingly the highest-leverage applied activity it can pursue.
The engagement with funding agencies serves four specific functions that deserve separate treatment.
2.1 Portfolio Review
The first function is the systematic review of funding portfolios to identify patterns of attention and gaps. A funding agency’s portfolio is the cumulative result of many individual grant decisions, and the patterns that emerge in the portfolio often differ from the priorities the agency would state in its formal documents. The portfolio may concentrate on particular topics, populations, methods, or institutions in ways that nobody explicitly chose, and the concentrations may persist for years without being noticed by the agency’s leadership.
Portfolio review provides funding agencies with information that their internal review processes do not produce. The agencies’ grant-review processes evaluate individual proposals against criteria specific to each program; the portfolio-level analysis examines the cumulative pattern across programs and across years. The two perspectives are complementary, and the portfolio review can identify patterns that no individual grant decision would have produced and that the agency has reason to want to know about.
The field’s contribution to portfolio review combines bibliometric and scientometric methods (Paper 2 and Paper 5) with substantive knowledge of the research areas the portfolio covers. The output is a structured report that documents what the portfolio supports, identifies the patterns of attention that emerge, compares the patterns to relevant external indicators (disease burden, expressed public concern, theoretical centrality), and flags the candidate cases where the patterns appear difficult to justify on substantive grounds. The report does not, in its standard form, recommend specific changes to the portfolio; it provides the information that the agency’s own decision-makers can use to consider whether changes are warranted.
The standard form is important because it preserves the analytical independence the field requires. A portfolio review that ends with specific recommendations becomes an advocacy document, and the boundary between scholarship and advocacy is precisely the one the field must maintain. A portfolio review that ends with information allows the agency to reach its own conclusions, with the field’s scholars available for consultation if the agency wants further analysis but without the field becoming the agency’s policy advocate.
The arrangement under which portfolio reviews are conducted requires careful design. The agency must commit to the review’s analytical independence, meaning that the field’s scholars conduct the work according to the field’s methodological standards rather than according to the agency’s preferences. The scholars must commit to constructive engagement with the agency, meaning that the work is conducted in conversation with the agency’s staff rather than as an external audit. The output must be available to both the agency and the field’s scholarly community, with the agency receiving the report first but with publication following on an agreed timeline. The structure has been used successfully in adjacent contexts and provides a workable model.[^1]
2.2 Priority-Setting Consultation
The second function is consultation in the priority-setting processes by which funding agencies establish their research priorities. The processes vary across agencies, but they typically include some combination of advisory committees, public consultations, strategic planning exercises, and program-specific reviews. The field’s contribution to these processes draws on the priority-setting methodology developed by the James Lind Alliance and adapted by others (Papers 2 and 4), with the contribution focused on the structured identification of neglected questions that the priority-setting process can consider.
The consultation work differs from portfolio review in being prospective rather than retrospective. The portfolio review examines the cumulative results of past decisions; the priority-setting consultation provides input into future decisions. The two are complementary, and the field’s engagement with funding agencies should typically include both.
The consultation work requires the field’s scholars to participate in advisory processes whose pace and structure differ from those of conventional scholarship. The processes operate on the timelines that the agency requires, with deliverables that the agency specifies, and with constraints on confidentiality and disclosure that the agency imposes. The constraints are typically compatible with the field’s analytical standards, but the field’s scholars must be prepared to work within them, and the workforce strategy of Paper 6 must include training in the skills the engagement requires.
A specific consideration is the field’s relationship to the constituencies whose voices the priority-setting processes are intended to include. The James Lind Alliance methodology and similar approaches emphasize the inclusion of patients, clinicians, and affected communities in research-priority decisions, and the field’s contribution to priority-setting should support rather than substitute for those voices. The field’s scholars provide methodological expertise and substantive analysis that complement the lived-experience contributions of affected communities; they should not present themselves as speaking for the communities whose participation the process is designed to include.
2.3 Embedded Analysis
The third function is embedded analysis, in which a scholar trained in the field’s methods is hosted by a funding agency for an extended period — typically one to two years — to conduct analyses that the agency’s own staff is not positioned to conduct. The embedding provides the field’s scholars with access to data and processes that external researchers cannot easily obtain, and provides the agency with analytical capacity that its own staffing structure does not support.
Embedded analysis has been used in several adjacent contexts, with mixed results that depend on the design of the arrangement. The arrangements that have worked well share several features. The scholar’s institutional affiliation remains with the home university or research center rather than transferring to the agency, which preserves the scholar’s analytical independence. The agency commits to providing access to the data and processes the work requires, with the access governed by explicit agreements that protect both the analytical work and the agency’s legitimate confidentiality interests. The scholar’s outputs are published in the field’s scholarly outlets on an agreed timeline, with the agency receiving early access but not vetoing publication. The scholar’s reentry into the academic world after the embedding is supported by arrangements that preserve the scholar’s career trajectory, since embedding work is sometimes undervalued in conventional tenure evaluations.
The arrangements that have worked poorly typically failed on one or more of these features. The scholar’s affiliation transferred to the agency, with the scholar’s outputs becoming agency documents rather than scholarly publications. The agency restricted publication on terms the scholar accepted under pressure but later regretted. The scholar’s career suffered because the embedding work was not recognized appropriately by the home institution. The lessons from the unsuccessful arrangements are documented and can inform the field’s embedded-analysis program.[^2]
The field should pursue embedded-analysis arrangements with several funding agencies as a priority engagement activity. The arrangements provide the field with the data access required for substantial work, provide the agencies with analytical capacity they value, and produce the kinds of scholarly outputs that build the field’s track record. The arrangements should be initiated through formal agreements rather than individual relationships, so that they survive changes in agency leadership and changes in the scholar’s career.
2.4 Foundation Engagement
The fourth function is engagement with private foundations as distinct from public funding agencies. The distinction matters because foundations operate with different constraints, different timelines, and different decision-making structures, and the engagement strategy must accommodate the differences.
Foundations are typically more accessible than public agencies, with shorter decision cycles, more flexible engagement structures, and program officers who have substantial discretion over funding decisions within their portfolios. The accessibility makes foundations natural early partners for the field’s engagement work, and the funding strategy of Paper 4 already identified them as the likely first movers in the field’s funding pipeline. The engagement strategy should build on the funding relationships to develop the analytical engagement that the field can offer foundations on the same terms it offers public agencies.
Foundations also have specific limitations. Their resources are smaller than those of major public agencies, which limits the scale of the analytical work they can support. Their portfolios are more specialized, which limits the breadth of the analyses that are relevant to any individual foundation. Their priorities can shift more rapidly than public agencies’ priorities, which creates challenges for sustained engagement. The engagement strategy should attend to these limitations and should pursue foundation engagement with realistic expectations about what individual relationships can accomplish.
3. Learned Societies and Journals
Learned societies and journals are the second category of research-governing institutions with which the field must engage. Their decisions affect attention patterns through different mechanisms than funding-agency decisions: by determining what is published, what is presented at conferences, what is recognized through awards and honors, and what defines the working priorities of the disciplines they serve.
The engagement with learned societies serves several specific functions.
The first is the commissioning of stocktaking reviews of disciplines’ own neglected territory. The stocktaking review series introduced in Paper 3 provides a structured venue for such reviews, and the engagement with learned societies should include encouraging them to commission stocktakings of their own fields’ attention patterns. The commissioning gives the societies ownership of the reviews and ensures that the work is conducted with the substantive depth that disciplinary expertise allows. The societies’ membership becomes an audience for the reviews, with the resulting discussions taking place in the venues where disciplinary priorities are actually set.
The second is engagement with journal editorial policies. Journals shape attention patterns through their editorial decisions about what kinds of work they will publish, what methodological standards they apply, what evaluative criteria they use, and what topics they treat as within or outside their scope. The decisions accumulate over time into the patterns that constitute disciplinary literatures, and changes in editorial policy can shift the patterns in ways that individual scholarly effort cannot. The field’s engagement with journals should include specific proposals for editorial changes that would address documented patterns of neglect — special issues commissioned on neglected topics, registered reports that reduce the disadvantages faced by exploratory work, training of reviewers in recognizing the value of work on neglected questions, and editorial standards that explicitly accommodate methodological pluralism.
The third is engagement with peer-review practice. The peer-review literature (cited in earlier papers) has documented the mechanisms by which conventional peer review produces conservatism, and several adaptations have been developed to address the mechanisms. The field’s engagement with journals and conferences should include advocacy for the adaptations that are well-supported by evidence: registered reports for confirmatory work, open peer review where appropriate, structured rubrics that reduce reviewer bias toward established questions, and explicit consideration of whether submissions address neglected areas in evaluating their contribution.
The fourth is engagement with recognition structures. Learned societies typically administer awards, prizes, and honorific recognition that shape disciplinary career trajectories. The recognition structures tend to reinforce existing patterns of attention by rewarding work on established questions, and the engagement with learned societies should include specific proposals for recognition structures that reward work on neglected questions. The proposals can take the form of new awards, of explicit criteria for existing awards that recognize the value of work on neglected questions, or of nominations for existing awards of scholars whose work on neglected questions would otherwise be overlooked.
The engagement with learned societies and journals is slower than engagement with funding agencies because the relevant decisions are more distributed and the mechanisms for change are more diffuse. The engagement should be sustained over the long term rather than expected to produce rapid results, and the field should measure progress by the cumulative changes in editorial practice and disciplinary norms rather than by any individual decision.
4. University Administrations
University administrations are the third category of research-governing institutions, and their decisions affect attention patterns through the structures that determine what scholarship is professionally rewarded. The decisions include tenure and promotion criteria, faculty hiring priorities, departmental and center funding, teaching loads and assignments, and the broader institutional climate that affects what kinds of work scholars feel free to pursue.
The engagement with university administrations is among the slowest of the field’s applied activities to produce visible results, because the relevant decisions operate on long timescales and affect attention patterns through indirect mechanisms. A change in tenure criteria that explicitly recognizes interdisciplinary work shifts the career incentives for current doctoral students, who will publish their first books a decade later, who will receive tenure five years after that, and who will eventually serve on tenure committees that apply the revised criteria to subsequent generations. The timeline is generational, and the engagement strategy must be paced accordingly.
The engagement with university administrations serves several functions.
The first is advocacy for tenure and promotion criteria that recognize the field’s distinctive contributions. The criteria that work poorly for the field’s scholars were discussed in Paper 6, and the engagement with university administrations should include specific proposals for revised criteria that recognize the value of interdisciplinary work, of work in newly established outlets, of methodological innovation, and of applied engagement with research-governing institutions. The proposals are most effective when they draw on the precedents established in adjacent interdisciplinary fields, since the administrations are more receptive to proposals that have been implemented elsewhere than to proposals that require them to be pioneers.
The second is advocacy for faculty appointments in the field. The appointments at the founding centers (Paper 3) are essential foundations, but the broader workforce that the field requires depends on appointments at universities that do not host founding centers. The engagement with these universities should include specific proposals for appointments — joint appointments between relevant disciplines and metascience programs, dedicated lines in newly established programs, appointment criteria that explicitly accommodate the field’s distinctive profile — and should provide the universities with the information they need to evaluate the proposals.
The third is engagement with the structures that determine doctoral training. The doctoral programs that produce the field’s workforce operate under university structures that affect what students can be admitted, what they can be taught, and what dissertations are accepted. The engagement with university administrations should include advocacy for the structures that support the field’s training pathways — concentrations within existing programs, joint programs across departments, dedicated programs at institutions where the founding investment can be justified.
The fourth is engagement with the broader institutional climate that affects what kinds of work scholars feel free to pursue. The climate is shaped by many factors: the administrators’ rhetoric about what the university values, the funding decisions that signal institutional priorities, the appointment patterns that shape the senior faculty’s composition, and the disciplinary norms that operate within departments. The engagement with administrations should include attention to all of these factors, with the recognition that no single intervention will transform the climate but that sustained attention across multiple dimensions can shift it over time.
5. Government Science Advisory Bodies
Government science advisory bodies and parliamentary committees represent the highest-leverage engagement opportunities the field will have. The bodies advise governments on research-policy decisions, on the allocation of public research funding, on the structure of the research system, and on the broader policies that shape what kinds of scholarship are conducted in their jurisdictions. The decisions that emerge from this engagement affect attention patterns across entire national research systems, and the leverage corresponds to the breadth of effect.
The engagement also carries the highest risks. Government bodies operate in political environments that pose risks of co-optation, of political entanglement, and of the field’s work being used in ways that compromise its analytical independence. The engagement strategy must accordingly include explicit protections against the specific risks that government engagement creates.
The advisory bodies relevant to the field include those that operate at the level of national governments, those that operate at the level of regional or sub-national governments, and those that operate within particular government departments responsible for research policy. The structures vary across jurisdictions, but several engagement functions are common across them.
The first is participation in advisory processes that bear on research-policy decisions. The participation can take the form of formal membership on advisory committees, of submissions to consultations, of presentations to relevant committees, and of informal engagement with the staff who support the advisory processes. The participation should be conducted by the field’s senior scholars, since the advisory work requires both substantive depth and the institutional standing that gives the contributions weight.
The second is the production of research-policy reports commissioned by government bodies. The reports typically address specific questions on which the commissioning body has decided it wants analytical input, and they provide the field’s scholars with opportunities to apply the field’s methods to questions of direct policy relevance. The commissioning relationships should be governed by terms that protect the analytical independence of the work, with the commissioning body specifying the questions but not the answers.
The third is engagement with parliamentary or legislative committees on questions bearing on research policy. The engagement can include formal testimony, the provision of background briefings, and the development of relationships with committee staff who maintain institutional memory across the political cycles that affect elected officials. The engagement requires the field’s scholars to be prepared to work in environments where the audiences are not scholars and where the standards of communication are different from those of conventional scholarly publication.
The risks of government engagement deserve specific treatment. The first risk is political polarization: in jurisdictions where research policy has become a contested political issue, the field’s engagement can be drawn into the political contestation in ways that compromise its analytical credibility. The corrective is to maintain the field’s commitment to evenhanded analysis that does not align predictably with any political position, and to resist the pressure to use the field’s work to support political positions that the field’s scholars happen to favor. The pressure is real, particularly for scholars whose personal commitments align with one political position more than another, and the professional norms must explicitly support the resistance.
The second risk is the use of the field’s work by political actors in ways the field’s scholars did not intend. Reports commissioned for one purpose are sometimes cited in service of arguments their authors did not endorse, and the field’s scholars must be prepared for this and must develop the institutional practices that allow them to clarify the limits of their work without losing the engagement that the work is intended to support. The clarification can take the form of explicit statements about what the work supports and does not support, of follow-up communications when the work is used inappropriately, and of public statements when the misuse is sufficiently serious to require correction.
The third risk is institutional capture: the gradual alignment of the field’s work with the priorities of the government bodies it engages with, to the point that the field becomes a service provider to those bodies rather than an independent analytical voice. The corrective is the diversification of the field’s engagements, the maintenance of analytical independence as a non-negotiable commitment, and the cultural maintenance that Paper 4 identified as the deepest of the field’s institutional challenges.
6. International Scientific Organizations
The international dimension of the field’s engagement is the slowest of its applied activities to develop, because the international structures operate on longer timelines, with more diffuse decision-making, and with greater coordination requirements than the national-level engagements discussed above. The international agenda should accordingly be paced realistically, with the expectation that substantial international engagement will develop only after the field has consolidated at the national level in at least several jurisdictions.
The relevant international organizations include UNESCO and its science-related programs, the International Science Council and its disciplinary unions, the OECD’s working groups on research policy, and the various regional bodies that coordinate research policy within particular geographic areas. The engagement with these organizations serves several functions.
The first is the development of international comparative analyses that no single national engagement could produce. The field’s data infrastructure (Paper 5) supports comparative work across national research systems, and the international organizations provide both venues for presenting comparative findings and partners for the comparative work itself. The comparative analyses are particularly valuable for the field because they identify which patterns of attention are general features of scholarly inquiry and which are contingent on particular national arrangements (Paper 2).
The second is the development of international standards and norms that the field’s work can contribute to. The standards and norms include those for research integrity, for open science, for research-priority-setting, and for the broader practices that shape attention patterns across national systems. The field’s contribution should focus on the specific elements where neglect-studies expertise has distinctive value, rather than attempting to address the broader standards comprehensively.
The third is the support of neglect-studies development in jurisdictions where the field has not yet established itself. The international engagement provides the field’s scholars with opportunities to support colleagues in jurisdictions whose research-policy environments are less hospitable to the field’s work, to share the methodological and institutional resources the founding centers have developed, and to contribute to the broader internationalization of the field. The support should be offered on terms that respect the autonomy of scholars in different jurisdictions, recognizing that the patterns of attention vary across systems and that the field’s specific findings in one jurisdiction may not translate to others.
The risks of international engagement include all the risks of national-level engagement, with the addition of the specific risks created by the institutional complexity of international organizations. The organizations operate with constraints that the field’s scholars may not fully understand, with political dynamics that differ from those of national bodies, and with timelines that can be substantially longer than scholars accustomed to national engagement might expect. The engagement should be conducted with explicit awareness of these features and with realistic expectations about the pace and the products of the work.
7. The Independence Problem
The central tension that engagement creates — between usefulness to research-governing institutions and analytical credibility about them — runs through all the engagement domains discussed above. This section addresses the institutional structures that can manage the tension.
The first structural commitment is the diversification of the field’s relationships with research-governing institutions. A field whose engagement is concentrated with a single funder, a single agency, or a single set of relationships is vulnerable to the priorities of its dominant partner in ways that compromise its independence. The diversification across funders (Paper 4) and across engagement relationships supports the field’s capacity to refuse engagement on terms that would compromise its work, since the refusal does not threaten the field’s survival as it might if the relationship were the field’s only source of support.
The second commitment is the maintenance of analytical independence as a non-negotiable element of all engagement relationships. The relationships should be governed by explicit terms that protect the independence: the field’s scholars conduct work according to the field’s methodological standards, the outputs are published in the field’s scholarly outlets, and the engagement partners receive analytical input rather than predetermined conclusions. The terms should be documented in formal agreements rather than relying on informal understandings, since informal understandings tend to drift under sustained pressure in ways that documented agreements do not.
The third commitment is the cultural maintenance of professional norms that reward uncomfortable findings rather than punishing them. The norms operate through the field’s professional community: through the journal’s editorial practice, through the conference’s program decisions, through the registry’s quality standards, and through the field’s informal recognition structures. The norms must specifically reward the production of findings that engagement partners would prefer not to be published, with the recognition that such findings are the strongest evidence of the field’s analytical credibility. The norms must also protect scholars whose findings have produced friction with engagement partners, since the friction can otherwise impose career costs that discourage the kinds of work the field most needs.
The fourth commitment is the institutional separation of the field’s engagement work from its scholarly work. The separation does not mean that the same scholars cannot do both — many of the field’s most effective scholars will be engaged in both modes — but rather that the relationships and outputs of each mode should be governed by appropriate structures. The engagement work operates under the terms that engagement partners require; the scholarly work operates under the terms that the field’s professional standards establish. When the two modes generate conflicting requirements — when an engagement partner asks for findings that the scholarly standards would not support, or when scholarly findings produce friction with an engagement partner — the separation provides the field with explicit choices about how to handle the conflict, rather than blurring the modes in ways that compromise both.
The fifth commitment is the maintenance of the field’s reflexive program, which Paper 8 will develop more fully. A field that examines the patterns of attention in scholarly inquiry must be willing to examine its own attention patterns, including the patterns produced by the field’s engagement relationships. The reflexive work should include periodic audits of how the engagement relationships affect the field’s research portfolio, of whether the engagement has produced shifts in the field’s emphases that the field’s scholars would endorse on reflection, and of whether the field is becoming captured by the institutions it engages with. The audits should be conducted by the field’s professional structures rather than by the engagement partners, and the findings should be published in the field’s scholarly outlets.
The structural commitments cannot eliminate the tension between engagement and independence. The tension is intrinsic to the field’s situation and will require ongoing attention as long as the field continues to engage with research-governing institutions. The commitments can, however, manage the tension in ways that allow the field to be useful to engagement partners without losing the analytical credibility on which its usefulness depends. The management is among the most important professional disciplines the field will need to develop, and the institutional structures that support it must be designed with the recognition that the pressures against them will be persistent.
8. Conclusion
This paper has proposed an engagement strategy for neglect studies that addresses funding agencies, learned societies and journals, university administrations, government science advisory bodies, and international scientific organizations. The strategy combines specific engagement functions for each domain with structural commitments that protect the field’s analytical independence across all of them. The strategy operates on long timelines and depends on the institutional infrastructure that the preceding papers have specified.
The engagement work cannot be conducted without the workforce that Paper 6 discussed, the funding diversification that Paper 4 outlined, the data resources that Paper 5 specified, the academic infrastructure that Paper 3 proposed, the methodological standards that Paper 2 developed, and the conceptual framework that Paper 1 established. The interdependencies among the elements of the field’s institutional infrastructure are the dominant feature of the series, and the engagement paper is the most exposed to those interdependencies because it requires all the other elements to function.
The engagement work is also the most visible to external audiences and the most consequential for the field’s broader influence. The field’s eventual impact on the distribution of scholarly attention depends substantially on whether the engagement succeeds, and the engagement succeeds only if the field maintains the analytical credibility that justifies the engagement in the first place. The circle is virtuous when it works and damaging when it fails, and the structural commitments that this paper has proposed are the field’s best protection against the failure modes.
Paper 8, the final paper in the series, takes up the field’s identity, its public engagement, and the reflexive self-critique that a field of this kind requires. The engagement work that this paper has discussed will be conducted by the scholars whose identity Paper 8 will address, and the reflexive program that Paper 8 will propose will examine the engagement work among its other subjects.
Notes
[^1]: Portfolio review arrangements have been conducted with various funders over the past two decades, often through partnerships between academic researchers and the funders themselves. The most documented examples include several U.S. National Institutes of Health portfolio analyses and the analyses commissioned by the Wellcome Trust and the U.K. Medical Research Council. The arrangements vary in their specific terms but share the general structure described in section 2.1.
[^2]: The literature on embedded researchers in policy organizations is reviewed in Cherney and Head (2010) and in subsequent work. The findings on what makes embedded arrangements succeed or fail are consistent across multiple national contexts and policy domains.
[^3]: The engagement of learned societies with research-priority questions has been documented in several disciplinary cases; the work of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on cross-disciplinary research priorities and the parallel work of European disciplinary unions provides relevant examples.
[^4]: The literature on tenure and promotion criteria in interdisciplinary contexts, cited in Paper 6, develops further in the work on university administrative responses to interdisciplinary fields. Klein (2010) provides a useful treatment of the institutional dimensions, and Pfirman and Martin (2010) addresses the specific question of how interdisciplinary scholars are evaluated.
[^5]: The literature on government science advisory bodies is reviewed in Doubleday and Wilsdon (2013) and in subsequent work on the changing role of scientific advice in policy contexts. The risks of political entanglement that the literature documents are directly relevant to the engagement strategy outlined in section 5.
[^6]: The international scientific organizations have substantial documentation of their own structures and processes, available through their websites and institutional publications. The scholarly literature on the role of international organizations in research policy is partial but includes useful treatments in Crawford, Shinn, and Sörlin (1993) and in subsequent work on the internationalization of scientific governance.
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