In 2004, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation launched a new program focused on incubating a new field, “Microbiology of the Built Environment” (MoBE). By the end of 2017, the program had supported the publication of hundreds of scholarly works, but it was unclear to what extent it had stimulated the development of a new research community. We identified 307 works funded by the MoBE program, as well as a comparison set of 698 authors who published in the same journals during the same period of time but were not part of the Sloan Foundation-funded collaboration. Our analysis of collaboration networks for both groups of authors suggests that the Sloan Foundation’s program resulted in a more consolidated community of researchers, specifically in terms of number of components, diameter, density, and transitivity of the coauthor networks. In addition to highlighting the success of this particular program, our method could be applied to other fields to examine the impact of funding programs and other large-scale initiatives on the formation of research communities.

There is widespread interest in evaluating the social impacts of research and other scholarly activities. Conventional metrics for social impacts focus on economics or wealth creation, such as patents or technology transfer. These kinds of metrics are less appropriate for many scholarly fields, and miss the specific social concerns or needs that researchers aim to address. In this paper, drawing on ideas from ethics and development economics, we develop a conceptual framework for characterizing the social goals of research. We first distinguish resources-such as wealth and intellectual credit-from the goals of scholarship, and further distinguish inward-and outward-facing goals. Outward-facing goals refer to the intended social impacts of research. Next we introduce the Capabilities Approach, a conceptual framework for human well-being developed by ethicists and economists over the last 40 years. This Approach focuses on basic human needs, rather than wealth, and we draw specifically on a list of central human capabilities developed by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. We propose that the items on this list provide a useful starting point for articulating the specific social aims of research. We argue that the Capabilities Approach can facilitate research communication and improve the recognition of public engagement in academic and funding institutions. Familiar bibliographic data and text mining methods can be used in a capabilities-inspired portfolio analysis, and modest changes to existing data collection systems-for tenure and promotion, or research funding applications-could support the development of even richer capabilities-inspired metrics and incentive systems.

Land-use control is local and highly varied. State agencies struggle to assess plan contents. Similarly, advocacy groups and planning researchers wrestle with the length of planning documents and ability to compare across plans. The goal of this research is to (1) introduce Natural Language Processing techniques that can automate qualitative coding in planning research and (2) provide policy-relevant exploratory findings. We assembled a database of 461 California city-level General Plans, extracted the text, and used topic modeling to identify areas of emphasis (clusters of co-occurring words). We find that California city general plans address more than sixty topics, including greenhouse gas mitigation and Climate Action Planning. Through spatializing results, we find that a quarter of the topics in plans are regionally specific. We also quantify the rift and convergence of planning topics. The topics focused on housing have very little overlap with other planning topics. This is likely a factor of state requirements to update and evolve the Housing Elements every five years, but not other aspects of General Plans. This finding has policy implications as housing topics evolve away from other emphasis areas such as transportation and economic development. Furthermore, the topic modeling approach reveals that many cities have had a focus on environmental justice through Health and Wellness Elements well before the state mandate in 2019. Our searchable state-level database of general plans is the first for California—and nationally. We provide a model for others that wish to comprehensively assess and compare plan contents using machine learning.

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1In 2004, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation launched a new program focused on incubating a new field, "Microbiology of the Built 2 Environment" (MoBE). By the end of 2017, the program had supported the publication of hundreds of scholarly works, but it 3 was unclear to what extent it had stimulated the development of a new research community. We identified 307 works funded 4 by the MoBE program, as well as a comparison set of 698 authors who published in the same journals during the same period of 5 time but were not part of the Sloan Foundation-funded collaboration. Our analysis of collaboration networks for both groups 6 of authors suggests that the Sloan Foundation's program resulted in a more consolidated community of researchers, specifically 7 in terms of number of components, diameter, density, and transitivity of the coauthor networks. In addition to highlighting 8 the success of this particular program, our method could be applied to other fields to examine the impact of funding programs 9 and other large-scale initiatives on the formation of research communities. 10 12Environment", sometimes known as "MoBE". The aims of this program were to catalyze research on microbes 13 and microbial communities in human built environments, such as homes, vehicles, and water systems; and to 14 develop the topic into a whole field of inquiry. Prior to 2004, many new developments (e.g., major advances 15 in DNA sequencing technology) had catalyzed innovation in studies of microbes found in other environments 16 (e.g., those living in and on humans and other animals, those found in the soil, those found in the oceans), 17 but these innovations had not spread rapidly enough to studies of the microbes in the built environment. 18Similarly, many developments had occurred in studies of the built environment (e.g., the spread of low cost 19 sensor systems), but focus had not yet been placed on the living, microbial components of built environments. 20This is not to say there had been no studies on the MoBE topic prior to 2004, but rather that the pace of 21 advances in the area were modest at best compared to advances in other areas of microbiology and built 22 environment studies. The MoBE area was founded on the belief that institutionally supported, integrated, 23 trans-disciplanary scientific inquiry could address these shortfalls and lead to major benefits in areas such 24 as indoor health, disease transmission, biodefense, forensics, and energy efficiency. 25The Sloan Foundation's program ultimately lasted 15 years and invested more than $50 million on work 26 in the MoBE field. A key goal of this program was to bring together the highly disparate fields of mi-27 crobiology (especially the area focused on studies of entire ecosystems of microbes) and building science 28 (e.g. with a focus on building, maintaining, regulating, and studying built environments) with their different 29 approaches, cultures, incentives, and rewards. Grants were given to many projects and a diverse collection of 30 people covering many fields i...