Accomplishments of the Behavioral and Social Sciences—Let’s Generate a Comprehensive List

Accomplishments of the Behavioral and Social Sciences – Let’s Generate a Comprehensive List

For a number of years, the OBSSR has made available a fact sheet (PDF, 1,071 KB) that lists some key accomplishments of health-related behavioral and social sciences research. That fact sheet, developed in 2013, is becoming dated and is a short list of only a few key accomplishments resulting from behavioral and social sciences research. The NIH behavioral and social sciences staff could generate an updated list, but we can generate a much more extensive and diverse list of accomplishments if we enlist the help of the larger behavioral and social sciences research community. Plus, your crowdsourcing input can also be used to help us identify the accomplishments that should be highlighted.

We need your help. Between now and midnight ET on July 31, 2019, we want everyone in the behavioral and social sciences research community to submit an accomplishment, add information to a submitted accomplishment, and/or vote on the ones that have had a substantial health impact and for which behavioral and social sciences research was critical to achieving. The website for submitting accomplishments is https://obssr.ideascale.com/.

When you submit, do not limit yourself to NIH-supported research—we know that NIH funds important and impactful research, but research leading to health accomplishments is not limited to the research that the NIH funds. Do not limit yourself to only recent accomplishments—while our goal is partly to generate an updated list of accomplishments, the “oldies but goodies” are important contributions that show the sustained impact of our sciences. And do not limit yourself to accomplishments resulting only from your research—this is not a contest to determine whose research has been most impactful.

After we have collected your submissions and votes, an expert panel will review the submissions and assist OBSSR in how best to select, organize, and make available online. We hope that this accomplishments resource will be useful when any of us need to make the case for the importance of the behavioral and social sciences to health. Join us in contributing to this important resource.