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Key Findings:

• The conceptual framework notes environmental factors and activities funded by ARRA CER. It lists process outputs, intermediate societal impacts, and long-term societal impacts while considering mediating factors and changes in external factors that shape the CER landscape.
• Enumerating journal publications associated with ARRA CER projects could provide a quantifiable set of metrics of intermediate-term project products; however, technical challenges (for example, lack of standardization in grant numbers) and conceptual challenges (for example, not all ARRA CER projects involved project directors with the same motivation or opportunity to publish) remain.
• Social network analysis may be useful for describing existing CER collaborations and changes in them over time, but using it to examine the association between characteristics of collaborations and projects’ intermediate and long-term societal impacts will require overcoming both conceptual and methodological hurdles.
• Surveys of investigators and other members of the project teams could be a source of data for future evaluations, but it is difficult to use population surveys as an element of stakeholder input for the assessment of CER investments.