This report uses the following definitions drawn from the NSF HERD Survey:

• Basic Research: focused on the most basic understanding about the foundations of our world.
• Applied Research: basic science knowledge creation directed towards solving problems.
• Development: applying knowledge from research to new or improved products and processes.

We define the following terms for philanthropy, adapted from Conn et al. (2023):

• Current Philanthropy: Annual support for R&D expenditures at universities and nonprofit research organizations that is directly sponsored by nonprofit funders, including private foundations, grantmaking public charities, and other nonprofit funding organizations.
• Legacy Philanthropy: Additional support for R&D expenditures at universities and nonprofit research organizations that is sponsored by philanthropy through the annual payouts from institutional endowments that have been built up from past giving and investment gains.
• Total Philanthropic Contribution: The combination of current and legacy philanthropy.

R&D Overview

The primary data source for this section is the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics (NCSES) National Patterns of R&D Resources: 2022-23 Data Update, published in February 2025. We focus especially on the funding sources for R&D performed by universities and nonprofit research organizations, although the report includes all the data in Tables 3-5 and 7-9. The NSF indicates that some data for 2022 are preliminary and may be revised later. Similarly, the data for 2023 include estimates and are likely to be revised later.

We note that NSF takes great care to collect high quality data on the funding sources and performers for R&D expenditures and avoid instances of double counting.

To adjust for inflation and enable meaningful comparisons over time, all historical funding amounts have been converted to constant 2023 dollars. We use the Bureau of Economic Analysis Gross Domestic Product Implicit Price Deflator for this conversion, consistent with NSF’s approach.

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R&D By Field

The primary data source for this section is the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics Higher Education Research & Development Survey. We combine the most recent survey data (FY 2023, published in November 2024) with the survey results from the 12 previous years in which consistent data are available for a retrospective analysis from 2011 to 2023. In some cases, it was necessary to adjust the names of the fields and hierarchical structures to match the taxonomy of the 2023 data.

This section refers only to R&D at universities, although similar data are available for nonprofit research organizations in the Nonprofit Research Activities Survey for 2020-2022. The next data release (FY2023) is scheduled for October 2025.

We adjust for inflation by converting all funding amounts to constant 2023 dollars as noted above.

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Graduate Students and Postdocs

The primary data source for this section is the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering. We combine the most recent survey data release (FY 2023, published in January 2025) with historical survey data for all full-time graduate students (1980-2023), doctoral students only (2017-2023), master’s students only (2017-2023), and postdocs (2010-2023) in science, engineering, and health fields. We combine the data for science and health fields under the discipline “Science.”

NSF made some changes to the field and subfield classifications in 2017 and 2020, so there are some inconsistencies in the longitudinal data for graduate students and postdocs. For example, see the data on Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences and Molecular Biology.