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2017 may well be remembered as the year of alternative facts and fake news. Truth took a hit, and experts seemed to lose the public’s trust.

Scientists felt under siege as the Trump administration , appointed and left empty. Researchers braced for cuts to federally funded science.

So where did that leave science and its supporters? Here we spotlight five stories from our archive that show how scholars took stock of where scientists stand in this new climate and various ways to consider the value their research holds for society.

A Risk To Standing Up For Science

In April, the March for Science mobilized more than a million protesters worldwide to push back against what they saw as attacks on science and evidence-based policy. But some people in the research community to .

Emily Vraga, assistant professor in political communication at George Mason University, :

Maintaining that trust is imperative for scientists, both to be able to communicate public risks appropriately and to preserve public funding for research, she wrote.

Vraga and her colleagues’ research suggests that scientists don’t lose credibility when they advocate for policies based on their expertise. But there’s a distinction to be made between advocacy and mere partisanship – statements motivated by the science are received differently than if they’re perceived as driven by political beliefs.

Rhetorical Tools At The Ready

“Before dismissing this recommendation as a perverse appeal to slink into the mud or take up the corrupted weapons of the enemy, keep in mind that in academia, ‘rhetoric’ does not mean rank falsehoods, or mere words over substance.”With the feeling that there’s a “war on science” afoot, savvy scientists are thinking about how to defend their work. University of Washington professor of communication Leah Ceccarelli says they can for help in how to get their messages across. She writes:

It’s about building persuasive arguments, built on solid foundations, she says. Rhetoricians study effective communication – and they’re happy to open their toolbox to scientists.

Indeed, the is becoming a hot area of inquiry, as practitioners for effectively .

What You Lose When Science Gets Cut

Scientists are always scrambling to secure funding for their research, and during the first year of the Trump administration, it seemed science projects were consistently on the budget chopping block.

Christopher Keane, the vice president for research at Washington State University, made the case that federal funding for science ultimately , particularly when scholars within academia join forces with entrepreneurs in the private sector:

Slashing Science Projects Hurts Workers

Ohio State University economist Bruce Weinberg described how allowed him and his colleagues to on federally funded scientific research. Using administrative data, they were able to identify everyone paid to work on a research project, not just the few who appear as authors on any culminating journal articles.

The majority of people employed on research projects turn out to be somewhere in the training pipeline, whether undergraduates, graduate students or postdocs.

And to do all that work, Weinberg points out, labs need to purchase everything from “computers and software, to reagents, medical imaging equipment or telescopes, even to lab mice and rats.” Cut the federal funding for science and the economic effects will ripple out far beyond just university science buildings.

Basic Research Powers Later Patents

Skeptics may wonder: What’s the big deal? So we take a few years off from funding some basic research. Does basic research really matter? , the:

But is that right? To find out if basic research actually does lead to usable practical advances, they the links between patentable inventions and scientific research. Jones and Ahmadpoor created a “social network” style map, which connects patents and science papers using the reference citations in each. They found that:

It’s impossible to predict which basic research projects will be important in the marketplace, but they wrote that a very high share of scientific research does link “forward to usable practical advances. Most of the linkages are indirect, showing the manifold and unexpected ways” in which basic research can ultimately pay off.

This article was originally published on . Read the .