Related papers: Rethinking Resource Allocation in Science
Geopolitical tensions increasingly reshape the structure and openness of global science, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how successfully scientists adapt their work under such pressures. Using millions of funding and publication…
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…
In most countries, basic research is supported by research councils that select, after peer review, the individuals or teams that are to receive funding. Unfortunately, the number of grants these research councils can allocate is not…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
There has been a lively debate in many fields, including statistics and related applied fields such as psychology and biomedical research, on possible reforms of the scholarly publishing system. Currently, referees contribute so much to…
Collaboration among researchers is an essential component of the modern scientific enterprise, playing a particularly important role in multidisciplinary research. However, we continue to wrestle with allocating credit to the coauthors of…
In this study, we consider research and development investment by the government. Our study is motivated by the bias in the budget allocation owing to the competitive funding system. In our model, each researcher presents research plans and…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
The proposed reductions in federal research support proposed by the Trump Administration for 2026 would profoundly degrade the United States research universities, especially in the STEM fields and medicine (STEMM). A potentially…
We are witnessing a rapid trend towards the adoption of exercises for evaluation of national research systems, generally based on the peer review approach. They respond to two main needs: stimulating higher efficiency in research activities…
The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees' work patterns and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features of…
The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We…
A major gap exists between the conceptual suggestion of how much a nation should invest in science, innovation, and technology, and the practical implementation of what is done. We identify 4 critical challenges that must be address in…
The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, to which researchers have responded by dedicating more time to education and training, narrowing their areas of specialization, and…
On August 2, 2021 a group of concerned scientists and US funding agency and federal government officials met for an informal discussion to explore the value and need for a well-coordinated US Open Research Commons (ORC); an interoperable…
We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they spend their time,…
The software engineering research community faces a systemic crisis: peer review is failing under growing submissions, misaligned incentives, and reviewer fatigue. Community surveys reveal that researchers perceive the process as "broken."…
Research funding allocation remains a critical bottleneck in scientific advancement, yet the review process for funding proposals lacks the transparency that has revolutionized academic paper peer review. Traditional funding agencies…
Peer-review plays a critical role in the scientific writing and publication ecosystem. To assess the efficiency and efficacy of the reviewing process, one essential element is to understand and evaluate the reviews themselves. In this work,…