Over the last couple of decades, funding agencies have increased pressure on scientists to demonstrate that their research has some societal benefit. When the National Science Foundation established the Broader Impacts requirement (NSF, 1997) by merging two review criteria—utility or relevance of the project and its effect on the infrastructure of science and engineering—principal investigators largely ignored it (Lok, 2010). Then, in 2002, NSF began to return (without review) any proposal that didn’t explicitly address broader impacts (NSF, 2002).

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