IV-35d: Sources of Funding for Academic Research and Development in the Humanities and Other Selected Fields, Fiscal Year 2023
* The system NSF uses to classify academic disciplines does not permit the separation of the more professionally oriented aspects of the communication discipline (e.g., broadcasting) from those that the Humanities Indicators treats as part of the humanities field (e.g., rhetoric and media studies). To avoid inflated estimates of humanities R&D expenditures, communication has been excluded from the humanities field for the purposes of this analysis.
** Business management and business administration; communication and communication technologies; education; law; social work; and visual and performing arts.
Source: National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), Higher Education Research and Development: Fiscal Year 2023, NSF 25-314(National Science Foundation, 2024), available at https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/higher-education-research-development/2023 (accessed 7/15/2025). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been surveying the nation’s colleges and universities about their expenditures for science and engineering research and development (R&D) since the early 1970s. As part of the fiscal year (FY) 2003 survey, NSF requested, for the first time, information on academic R&D in fields other than the sciences and engineering, including the humanities. The expenditures considered in the NSF survey are for both “sponsored research,” which is subsidized by outside entities (e.g., federal government agencies and private foundations), and “university research,” which is separately budgeted under an internal application of institutional funds (see the NSF survey questionnaire).
Prior to FY 2010, NSF did not attempt to estimate for nonresponse on the non-STEM research and development expenditure items included in the survey. Additionally, through FY 2010, the NSF R&D expenditure totals for the non-STEM fields were based on the spending of only those institutions that also performed science and engineering R&D. The expenditures of institutions that did not engage in science and engineering R&D but that may have conducted substantial amounts of research in humanities disciplines were not included. Beginning in FY 2011, NSF began including in its humanities R&D totals the expenditures of institutions that had spent at least $150,000 on R&D, irrespective of the fields in which such research was conducted.
These data underestimate the size of the national investment in college- and university-based humanities research because they do not capture two key forms of financial support for humanities faculty wishing to pursue research: (1) university-supported leave from teaching (e.g., sabbaticals); and (2) fellowship monies used by faculty to cover living expenses (when leave from teaching is without pay or at partial pay) and research-related costs (e.g., source materials and travel). Additionally, some universities that responded to the academic R&D survey reported only their science and engineering expenditures. For these reasons, the amounts reported here should be treated as lower-bound estimates of total investment in academic humanities research.
