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Two surveys of principal investigators conducted between April 2020 and January 2021 reveal that while the COVID-19 pandemic's initial impacts on scientists' research time seem alleviated, there has been a decline in the rate of initiating new projects. This dimension of impact disproportionately affects female scientists and those with young children and appears to be homogeneous across fields. These findings may have implications for understanding the longterm effects of the pandemic on scientific research.The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the scientific enterprise [1][2][3] . Researchers in the "bench" sciences, female scientists, and those with young children experienced significant declines in research time and other publication-based metrics, according to data collected before the summer of 2020 (refs. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] ). Now, more than a year into the pandemic and with multiple vaccines developed, circumstances have evolved substantially. This raises an important question: has the pandemic's impact on scientists evolved as well?To answer this question, we distributed a survey in January 2021 by randomly sampling USand Europe-based scientists across a wide range of scientific fields. Importantly, we adopted the same sampling strategy as a previous survey we conducted in April 2020 (ref. 1 ), which allowed us to directly compare the results of the surveys at these two very different stages of the pandemic (Supplementary Note 1 and Supplementary Fig. 1). In the January 2021 survey, we asked scientists many of the same questions from the April 2020 survey, including professional and demographic features. We also added new questions that compare their overall research activity and output in 2020 with 2019, including the number of new research publications, new submissions, new collaborators, and new research projects they started each year. Furthermore, we asked scientists whether or not they conducted any COVID-19-related research in 2020. In total, we collected responses from 6982 respondents across the two surveys who self-identified as faculty or principal investigators (Supplementary Note 2). To supplement our survey findings, we also conducted a series of analyses using a large-scale publication dataset, the Dimensions database, which captures both articles and preprints published up to the beginning of 2021.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is being used increasingly to address health disparities and complex health issues. The authors propose that CBPR can benefit from a systems science framework to represent the complex and dynamic characteristics of a community and identify intervention points and potential "tipping points." Systems science refers to a field of study that posits a holistic framework that is focused on component parts of a system in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems. Systems thinking tools can assist in intervention planning by allowing all CBPR stakeholders to visualize how community factors are interrelated and by potentially identifying the most salient intervention points. To demonstrate the potential utility of systems science tools in CBPR, the authors show the use of causal loop diagrams by a community coalition engaged in CBPR activities regarding youth drinking reduction and prevention.

This paper identifies the degree to which scientists are willing to change the direction of their work in exchange for resources. Data from the National Institutes of Health are used to estimate how scientists respond to targeted funding opportunities. Inducing a scientist to change their direction by a small amount—to work on marginally different topics—requires a substantial amount of funding in expectation. The switching costs of science are large. The productivity of grants is also estimated, and it appears the additional costs of targeted research may be more than offset by more productive scientists pursuing these grants. (JEL H51, I10, I23, O31, O33)

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A repeated-measures design with block randomization was used for the study, in which 14 adults with visual impairments attempted to detect three different vehicles: a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) with an artificially generated sound (Vehicle Sound for Pedestrians [VSP]), an HEV without the VSP, and a comparable internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. The VSP vehicle (mean +/− standard deviation [SD] = 38.3 +/− 14.8 m) was detected at a significantly farther distance than the HEV (mean +/− SD = 27.5 +/− 11.5 m), t = 4.823, p < 0.001, but no significant difference existed between the VSP and ICE vehicles (mean +/− SD = 34.5 +/− 14.3 m), t = 1.787, p = 0.10. Despite the overall sound level difference between the two test sites (parking lot = 48.7 dBA, roadway = 55.1 dBA), no significant difference in detection distance between the test sites was observed, F(1, 13) = 0.025, p = 0.88. No significant interaction was found between the vehicle type and test site, F(1.31, 16.98) = 0.272, p = 0.67. The findings of the study may help us understand how adding an artificially generated sound to an HEV could affect some of the orientation and mobility tasks performed by blind pedestrians.

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