Feasibility study for the development of an "Outreach Index" for quantitative evaluation of research institutes and their studies.

The results of the questionnaire survey sent out to universities and other research institutes in Japan in this study indicated that 59.1% on average of top 100 research institutes and middle 100 research institutes in receiving the amount distributed of 2008 Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research were carrying out monitoring of articles, etc. reported by mass-media, suggesting that a majority of research institutes were doing monitoring. Based on this, it was found that each research institute was ready and was capable for quantitatively measuring the degree of part of outreach and demonstrated high feasibility. Then, the degree of outreach was actually indexed and trials used for evaluating research institutes were performed. Indexing the degree of outreach enabled us to mark the beginning of visualizing part of outreach activities of research institutes.