templates: Tunable Research Domain list

[TheOldGogo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When a users is describing the project, the field "Research Domain" proposes choices of which 90% are irrelevant in our university.

Describe the solution you'd like
Our university is an STEM university, and so I would like my users to be able to chose their domain:

• within a shorter list of domains
• with more granularity in the STEM-related fields (for example, there's only one possible choice for the whole field of physics)
• maybe within a list that corresponds to the thematic divisions we use in our universities (although I can think of some problems with that)

So I would like to be able to chose the options that appear in this dropdown menu when I create a template.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[bofstein]

Thank you for this suggestion, this list could use more granularity as you suggest. The current list is from them OECD and uses the top two levels which are fairly broad as you point out. We could consider adding the third level as an option for people to provider more granularity if helpful. Physical Sciences for example would then have 8 subdomains to pick from.

There is a balance of going too granular and then not being able to connect topics more easily. To keep with machine-actionable goals, we want to limit having different user-generated domain options for each template, and would prefer to find a better list that works for everyone that is shared across DMPs. Do you have a standardized list you suggest we look at that we might consider updating ours to? We have been looking ideally for an authoritative API we could call that would update over time with new domains (e.g. we have gotten requests to add AI as a domain that is not included in this older list).

[TheOldGogo]

Hi! Sorry the notification went in my spam somehow.

Yes I believe the 3rd level as an option - together with the possibility to remove the arts and humanities parts - would really be useful for all STEM institutions.

Regarding our own list of disciplines, well, I could propose our list of academics programs for example. On the plus side this is probably more adapted to the current distribution of STEM research in general. However this is very specific to us. But maybe that could be a starting base for discussion.

The drawback is that such a list is very conjectural and likely to evolve with the trends. So it may be extremely relevant now, and not anymore tomorrow -> so it would need frequent updates, which may create problem of compatibility of the classification of old plans with that of more recent ones. Nothing that cannot be solved, but for sure it would require a dedicated attention.

An important interest though is that a lot of disciplines (for example material science) are really at the junction of the more classical classifications, as those are just not so adapted anymore. And so if you are looking for some plans from material science, I could guess than half of them are currently in physical sciences and the other half are in chemical sciences.

Maybe a field of Keywords could help to map topics across traditional disciplines? like a free text field, but with some curation for typo and an ontology in the backhand to account the fact that people may use different keywords for the same concept.

Indicative list of our academic programs by division:
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering:
- Applied Mathematics and Computational Science
- Computer Science
- Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Statistics

Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering:
- Bioengineering
- Bioscience
- Environmental Science and Engineering
- Marine Science
- Plant Science

Physical Science and Engineering
- Applied Physics
- Chemical Engineering
- Chemistry
- Earth Science and Engineering
- Energy Resources and Petroleum Engineering
- Material Science and Engineering
- Mechanical Engineering