Measuring Research And Development Expenditures In The Us Nonprofit Sector

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) of the National Science Foundation is responsible for national reporting of the research and development (R&D) activities that occur in all sectors of the United States economy. For most sectors, including the business and higher education sectors, NCSES collects data on these activities on a regular basis. However, data on R&D within the nonprofit sector have not been collected in 18 years, a time period which has seen dynamic and rapid growth of the sector. NCSES decided to design and implement a new survey of nonprofits, and commissioned this workshop to provide a forum to discuss conceptual and design issues and methods. Measuring Research and Development Expenditures in the U.S. Nonprofit Sector: Conceptual and Design Issues summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop. This report identifies concepts and issues for the design of a survey of R&D expenditures made by nonprofit organizations, considering the goals, content, statistical methodology, data quality, and data products associated with this data collection. The report also considers the broader usefulness of the data for understanding the nature of the nonprofit sector and their R&D activities. Measuring Research and Development Expenditures in the U. S. Nonprofit Sector will help readers understand the role of nonprofit sector given its enormous size and scope as well as its contribution to identifying new forms of R&D beyond production processes and new technology.

This report examines the portfolio of research and development (R&D) expenditure surveys at the National Science Foundation (NSF), identifying gaps and weaknesses and areas of missing coverage. The report takes an in-depth look at the definition of R&D, the needs and potential uses of NSF's R&D data by a variety of users, the goals of an integrated system of surveys and other data collection activities, and the quality of the data collected in the existing Science Resources Statistics surveys.

Panel to Review Research and Development Statistics at the National Science Foundation. The panel was convened in January 2002 by the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies at the request of the National Science Foundation to conduct an in-depth and broad-based study of the Research and Development Statistics program of the NSF Science Resources Statistics (SRS) Division. The study was later mandated by Congress in the National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002.