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After 2009 many governments implemented austerity measures, often restricting science funding. Did such restrictions further skew grant income towards elite scientists and universities? And did increased competition for funding undermine…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
We discuss, at the macro-level of nations, the contribution of research funding and rate of international collaboration to research performance, with important implications for the science of science policy. In particular, we…
Peer selection, the evaluation and selection of agents by their peers, is an important problem in the field of computational social choice; with applications to grading in massively online courses (MOOCs) and academic peer review. Current…
Recent studies conducted in different scientific disciplines have concluded that researchers belonging to some socio-cultural groups (e.g., women, racialized people) are usually less cited than other researchers belonging to dominating…
We develop a simple model of the scientific peer review process, in which authors of varying ability invest to produce papers of varying quality, and journals evaluate papers based on a noisy signal, choosing to accept or reject each paper.…
How are the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science? Here we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which has been growing in frequency in many contexts and…
Governments and organizations design performance-based research funding systems (PBFRS) for strategic aims, such as to selectively allocate scarce resources and stimulate research efficiency. In this work we analyze the relative change in…
Although different organizations have defined policies towards diversity in academia, many argue that minorities are still disadvantaged in university admissions due to biases. Extensive research has been conducted on detecting partiality…
Peer review in academic research aims not only to ensure factual correctness but also to identify work of high scientific potential that can shape future research directions. This task is especially critical in fast-moving fields such as…
Purpose: Citation-based assessments of countries' research capabilities often misrepresent their ability to achieve breakthrough advancements. These assessments commonly classify Japan as a developing country, which contradicts its…
In a commentary published in mid-2024 (to which the present work is a direct response), a number of scientists argue that U.S. funding agencies have "politicized" the process by which grants are awarded, in service of diversifying the…
To manage the problem of having a higher demand for resources than availability of funds, research funding agencies usually rank the major research groups in their area of knowledge. This ranking relies on a careful analysis of the research…
Scholarly journals rely on peer review to identify the science most worthy of publication. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even threatening the…
In the name of meritocracy, modern economies devote increasing amounts of resources to quantifying and ranking the performance of individuals and organisations. Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top…
While providing the resources and tools that make advanced research possible is a primary mission of academic libraries at large research universities, many other elements also contribute to the success of the research enterprise, such as…
The phenomenon of rankings is intimately related with the government interest in fiscalizing the research outputs of universities. New forms of managerialism have been introduced into the higher education system, leading to an increasing…
Both scientific progress and individual researcher careers depend on the quality of peer review, which in turn depends on paper-reviewer matching. Surprisingly, this problem has been mostly approached as an automated recommendation problem…
Peer review in grant evaluation informs funding decisions, but the contents of peer review reports are rarely analyzed. In this work, we develop a thoroughly tested pipeline to analyze the texts of grant peer review reports using methods…
This work analyses the links between individual research performance and academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences, for the period…