By Ben Terris

After nearly a year's delay, the National Science Foundation has released a report on doctoral-degree attainment, combining data from 2007 and 2008 and increasing the detail of data for minority groups.

The report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is sponsored by the NSF and several other federal agencies and prepared by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, usually comes out every November. But last year the NSF released selected findings only and postponed publication of the report in order to figure out a way to offer more detailed data about degree attainment by minority groups while also maintaining student privacy.

The findings released for 2007 omitted data on certain minority groups with very small numbers, out of concern that the data could be used to identify individuals in those groups and thus compromise their privacy. But people who use the survey complained that the missing data rendered the survey less useful.

To deal with those problems, this year's report discussed a number of tactics that would make it hard to identify individuals from the data reported. One option considered was to lump minority groups with very small numbers into a larger, "underrepresented minorities" category. In the end, the division of science resources at the NSF decided to group together areas of study with small populations. Now, for example, the data show that there are six American Indians who earned doctorates in "other fields," rather than dividing them up among six possible categories.

This year's data say, among other things, that 48,802 people were awarded doctorates in 2008, up 1.4 percent from 2007 (one of the smallest increases in the last several years). Forty-six percent of doctorates earned in 2008 were awarded to women. The largest doctoral field was the life sciences with 11,088 doctorates awarded.

The full report, "Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: Summary Report 2007-8," is available on the NSF's Web site.