Choosing an English name for a national science research institute [duplicate]

Question

I'm part of a group tasked with selecting an English name for a national science institute. There are a few choices, with what seem to be only subjective differences.

I'm using Scandinavia below as a country name placeholder.

The two most obvious choices seem to be:

Scandinavian Institute of Natural Sciences

and

Natural Science Institute of Scandinavia

I have searched the web for examples and found both, from all over the world, used pretty much interchangeably as far as I can tell.

My subjective feeling is that the former is a bit more formal, and would be my choice for a national institute, whereas the latter is a bit more informal and would be more appropriate for a smaller regional institute.

Are there any differences in these two names, subjective or objective?

And one bonus question, in Institute of Natural Sciences, does Sciences have to be plural? My feeling is that it does, but I'm having a hard time explaining why.

Answer 1

Of Scandinavia focuses on the connection with the country/land/territory. Scandinavian, on the other hand, may be taken the same way, but may also be taken to be primarily about the connection with the ethnicity/culture. The former formulation may thus arguably be more apt if one is eager to convey the idea that the institute 'belongs' equally to everybody living in Scandinavia, including those who are ethnically/culturally not Scandinavians.

This is, however, only arguably so, and only in some contexts; the difference, in so far as it exists, is subtle, and most English speakers will, in most contexts, probably ignore it, and regard the two formulations as interchangeable. The two formulations are particularly likely to be 'heard' as equivalent in the OP's specific case of the national institute for natural sciences: what such an institute does is unlikely to have a special connection to the ethnicity/culture. (Things could be different though, if we were talking about, say, Scandinavian Institute of Culinary Arts.)

As for the choice between science and sciences, it is a matter of standard dictionary definitions that science can be treated as either a mass term or a countable one. Treating it as countable makes explicit the distinctness of different scientific disciplines, but treating it as a mass term does not negate that distinctness, so there is, again, no decisive reasons for choosing one version over the other.

(In this answer, I am following the OP in treating Scandinavia as a placeholder for a name of a country; nothing in this answer is meant to be about the real-life Scandinavia, which is, of course, not a country. The answer applies to the names that are similar to Scandinavia in that they have natural-sounding adjectival forms in English; as has been pointed out by Mr Ashworth in a comment some country names don't.)