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Interdisciplinary research is fundamental when it comes to tackling complex problems in our highly interlinked world, and is on the rise globally. Yet, it is unclear why--in an increasingly competitive academic environment--one should…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
This study investigates the impact of competitive project-funding on researchers' publication outputs. Using detailed information on applicants at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and their proposals' evaluation, we employ a…
The search for and management of external funding now occupies much valuable researcher time. Whilst funding is essential for some types of research and beneficial for others, it may also constrain academic choice and creativity. Thus, it…
US funding agencies alone distribute a yearly total of roughly $65B dollars largely through the process of proposal peer review: scientists compete for project funding by submitting grant proposals which are evaluated by selected panels of…
Using the participation in peer reviewed publications of all doctoral students in Quebec over the 2000-2007 period this paper provides the first large scale analysis of their research effort. It shows that PhD students contribute to about a…
The average age at which U.S. researchers get their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific creativity and productivity of…
An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top scientists are dispersed…
At what level should government or companies support research? This complex multi-faceted question encompasses such qualitative bonus as satisfying natural human curiosity, the quest for knowledge and the impact on education and culture,…
In a recent publication in Nature, Wagner & Jonkers (2017) report that public R&D funding is only weakly correlated with the citation impact of a nation's papers as measured by the field-weighted citation index (FWCI; defined by Scopus). On…
Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best…
While philanthropic support for science has increased in the past decade, there is limited quantitative knowledge about the patterns that characterize it and the mechanisms that drive its distribution. Here, we map philanthropic funding to…
Despite broad acclaim for basic research, science is undergoing an applied shift that marginalizes basic scientists. This gap reflects an incomplete understanding of their distinctive roles, which prevents translating philosophical…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
Policy makers, at various levels of governance, generally encourage the development of research collaboration. However the underlying determinants of collaboration are not completely clear. In particular, the literature lacks studies that,…
Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…
In response to the call for a science of science policy, we discuss the contribution of indicators at the macro-level of nations from a scientometric perspective. In addition to global trends such as the rise of China, one can relate…
Funding acknowledgments are important objects of study in the context of science funding. This study uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the funding acknowledgments found in 2.3 million scientific publications published between 2008…
Competitive allocation of research funding is a major mechanism within the science system. It is fundamentally based on the idea of peer review. Peer review is central in project selection as peers are considered to be in a unique position…
Are the sciences not advancing at an ever increasing speed? We contrast this popular perspective with the view that science funding may actually see diminishing returns, at least regarding established fields. In order to stimulate a larger…