Anatomy of funded research in science

Abstract

Seeking research funding is an essential part of academic life. Funded projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in the formulation of these partnerships? Here, by examining over 43,000 scientific projects funded over the past three decades by one of the major government research agencies in the world, we characterize how the funding landscape has changed and its impacts on the underlying collaboration networks across different scales. We observed rising inequality in the distribution of funding and that its effect was most noticeable at the institutional level-the leading universities diversified their collaborations and increasingly became the knowledge brokers in the collaboration network. Furthermore, it emerged that these leading universities formed a rich club (i.e., a cohesive core through their close ties) and this reliance among them seemed to be a determining factor for their research success, with the elites in the core overattracting resources but also rewarding in terms of both research breadth and depth. Our results reveal how collaboration networks organize in response to external driving forces, which can have major ramifications on future research strategy and government policy. , and tremendous effort has been put in place in maximizing research output, because assessment outcomes often have a direct financial impact on an institution's revenue (1). Bibliometrics are commonly used for this kind of performance evaluations (2-7), and the volume of grant income is also generally seen as a good indicator of performance. Although many studies have examined the collaboration patterns originating from publication information (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14), little is known about the characteristics of project collaborations supported by research funding, which is undoubtedly a type of research output in its own right, but also the origin of other research outputs.The volume of funding is often subject to direct and indirect constraints arising from internal research strategies and different levels of policy set out by the funding bodies and ultimately by the national government. This manifests into different emphases on both the research area and mode of collaboration, and potentially influences the way we form a project team. We have already seen examples of adaptive changes in our collaboration practices. For instance, research in the science and engineering sector is said to be increasingly interorganizational (15). In addition, there are different theories on the factors that may affect the establishment of a collaboration and how well a research team operates (13, 16). Elite universities were recognized as catalysts for facilitating largescale multipartner research collaborations (15), and multidisciplinary collaborations were found to have higher potential to foster research outcomes (17). As a result, the setup of a project consortium for a grant application might require considerable strategic planning, because who and...

Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success

“…Do institutions with higher rates of funding success submit more interdisciplinary proposals (using higher success rates to support risky proposals) or fewer (because higher success rates arise from narrowly focused research)? We find that overall funding success rates varied between institutions, with significantly higher funding success rates in leading research-intensive universities (Extended Data Table 2) 18 . Differences in IDD between institutions were very small (R 2 = 0.001) and the negative relationship between IDD and success rate was significant when institution was taken into account (slope = − 0.39, P = 7.6 × 10 −11 ; Supplementary Table 2).…”

“…This national competitive grants scheme funds fundamental research in all academic fields, receiving approximately 3,500 proposals in each annual funding call, with success rates being around 15-20% of proposals (Extended Data Table 1). Our analysis is unique in including all submitted proposals, both successful and unsuccessful, whereas most analyses are restricted to the published lists of funded proposals 7,18 or to samples of case studies 3 .…”

A manifesto for fair and equitable research funding in ecology

“…The tendency to reward eminence or track record by giving them more weight to funding applications is, as Vazire (2017) points out, "… like giving Usain Bolt a 10 meter head start in his next race". This results in elite scientists over-attracting resources (Ma et al 2015;Szell and Sinatra 2015), with a bias towards an orthodoxy where well-established laboratories are favoured over those that are small or newly established (Alberts 1985, Alberts et al 2014Daniels 2015) even when established research units might deliver reduced productivity ovr time (Lorsch 2015).…”

Research funding goes to rich clubs

“…In PNAS, Ma et al (7) explore a dataset of 43,000 projects funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, a major government body of research funding in the United Kingdom, offering a unique perspective on these questions. In a longitudinal data analysis covering three decades, Ma et al (7) shed light into the relations between funding landscapes and scientific collaborations. The study finds increasing inequality over time on two levels: First, an elite circle of academic institutions tends to overattract funding, and, second, the very same institutions prefer to collaborate with each other.…”

“…Members of the rich club can act as brokers between nodes that belong to different communities (white). Rich clubs are found in diverse systems, including the network of scientific collaborations between academic institutions studied by Ma et al (7). In this case, the rich club implies a close circle of elite institutions that have increased power to control the access to information or to funding opportunities.…”