Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020

Taken together, the results imply that there has been a politicization of scientific funding in the US in recent years and a decrease in the diversity of ideas supported, indicating a possible decline in the quality of research and the potential for decreased trust towards scientific institutions among the general public. [...] Other information provided in these archives for each grant are the identities and institutions of the primary investigators, the award amount, the title of the proposal, and the NSF directorate that granted the award. [...] The parser reads all of these and takes the award title, the award ID, the abstract narration, the start date, the award amount, the NSF directorate, and the primary investigator’s first name. [...] The frequency of an individual word stem is the number of times that stem appears in the award text divided by the total number of words in the award text. [...] The cosine distance of the aggregate word embedding vector of an individual award to the aggregate word embedding vector of all the text in all awards in the directorate and year to which it belongs can be calculated as follows: 300 ? ? × ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? = 1 − ∑ ‖? ‖‖? ‖ ? =0 The Average Cosine Distance of Aggregate Word Embeddings from the Mean is then computed by taking the a.