  Stakeholders in the science system need to decide where to place their bets.
Example questions include: Which areas of research should get more funding? Who
should we hire? Which projects should we abandon and which new projects should
we start? Making informed choices requires knowledge about these research
options. Unfortunately, to date research portfolio options have not been
defined in a consistent, transparent and relevant manner. Furthermore, we don't
know how to define demand for these options. In this article, we address the
issues of consistency, transparency, relevance and demand by using a model of
science consisting of 91,726 topics (or research options) that contain over 58
million documents. We present a new indicator of topic prominence - a measure
of visibility, momentum and, ultimately, demand. We assign over $203 billion of
project-level funding data from STAR METRICS to individual topics in science,
and show that the indicator of topic prominence, explains over one-third of the
variance in current (or future) funding by topic. We also show that highly
prominent topics receive far more funding per researcher than topics that are
not prominent. Implications of these results for research planning and
portfolio analysis by institutions and researchers are emphasized.
