Science policy is increasingly shifting towards an emphasis in societal problems or grand challenges. As a result, new evaluative tools are needed to help assess not only the knowledge production side of research programmes or organisations, but also the articulation of research agendas with societal needs. In this paper, we present an exploratory investigation of science supply and societal needs on the grand challenge of obesity -an emerging health problem with enormous social costs. We illustrate a potential approach that uses topic modelling to explore: (a) how scientific publications can be used to describe existing priorities in science production; (b) how policy records (in this case here questions posed in the European parliament) can be used as an instance of mapping discourse of social needs; (c) how the comparison between the two may show (mis)alignments between societal concerns and scientific outputs. While this is a technical exercise, we propose that this type of mapping methods can be useful to domain experts for informing strategic planning and evaluation in funding agencies.

We introduce a new measurement of novelty based on the frequencies of pairwise combinations of article keywords. On the set of all research articles published from 1999 to 2013 in the journals referenced by the WoS (more than ten million papers), we find no evidence of shrinking novelty in science over that period. Novel contributions are more often performed in larger teams that span more institutional boundaries and geographic areas. High novelty increases both citations and the odds of a ?big hit? by more than forty percent but individual level returns to novelty may be low. In such a rapidly evolving environment, novelty is a lever for decreasing risk (not the reverse) as it increases the probability of addressing a problem that remains active in the future. We document that top journals play a very significant role in sustaining novelty in science.

Ce papier présente les résultats de la première évaluation des conséquences d’un accident de la route non mortel en France. Par la méthode d’évaluation contingente, dans le cadre de l’enquête MARC, des répondants révèlent leur consentement à payer (CAP) pour éviter un des 5 scénarii accidentels proposés. Le questionnaire informatisé est administré en face à-face à un échantillon représentatif de jeunes conducteurs français âgés de 18 à 25 ans. On observe une relation croissante entre niveau de CAP et gravité des conséquences et une corrélation positive entre le CAP et le revenu. Le sexe et les facteurs liés aux habitudes de conduite des individus n’affectent pas le CAP.