  Science policy is increasingly shifting towards an emphasis in societal
problems or grand challenges. As a result, new evaluative tools are needed to
help assess not only the knowledge production side of research programmes or
organisations, but also the articulation of research agendas with societal
needs. In this paper, we present an exploratory investigation of science supply
and societal needs on the grand challenge of obesity -an emerging health
problem with enormous social costs. We illustrate a potential approach that
uses topic modelling to explore: (a) how scientific publications can be used to
describe existing priorities in science production; (b) how records of
questions posed in the European parliament can be used as an instance of
mapping discourse of social needs; (c) how the comparison between the two may
show (mis)alignments between societal concerns and scientific outputs. While
this is a technical exercise, we propose that this type of mapping methods can
be useful for informing strategic planning and evaluation in funding agencies.
