Funding Data from Publication Acknowledgements: Coverage, Uses and Limitations.

Abstract

This article contributes to the development of methods for analysing research funding systems by exploring the robustness and comparability of emerging approaches to generate funding landscapes useful for policy making. We use a novel dataset of manually extracted and coded data on the funding acknowledgements of 7,510 publications representing UK cancer research in the year 2011 and compare these 'reference data' with funding data provided by Web of Science (WoS) and MEDLINE/PubMed. Findings show high recall (about 93%) of WoS funding data. By contrast, MEDLINE/PubMed data retrieved less than half of the UK cancer publications acknowledging at least one funder. Conversely, both databases have high precision (+90%): i.e. few cases of publications with no acknowledgement to funders are identified as having funding data. Nonetheless, funders acknowledged in UK cancer publications were not correctly listed by MEDLINE/PubMed and WoS in about 75% and 32% of the cases, respectively. 'Reference data' on the UK cancer research funding system are then used as a case-study to demonstrate the utility of funding data for strategic intelligence applications (e.g. mapping of funding landscape, comparison of funders' research portfolios).

A measure of knowledge flow between specific fields: Implications of interdisciplinarity for impact and funding

“…Because WoS started to record funding acknowledgments from August 2008 ( http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/webofscience/fundingsearch/ (accessed 11/4/2016)), we limit the dataset for funding analyses to articles published in 2009 and 2014. The coverage of funding acknowledgment information in WoS can be questionable in that it is based on self-reporting by authors and it potentially varies by such factors as research context, researcher’s country, and institutional norms, Nonetheless, Grassano, and Rotolo [ 23 ] indicated that WoS data provide reasonable coverage of the funding of research articles by showing that about 93% of U.K funded cancer research’s funding information has been indexed by WoS.…”

Stocktaking scientific publication on bi-regional collaboration between Europe 28 and Latin America and the Caribbean

“…It is recorded by WoS according three fields: "funding text", "funding agency" and also "grant number". Nevertheless, the presence of registers with no information does not necessarily mean they are a non-funded work, because authors do not always acknowledge their funders or because of problems related to the accuracy and completeness of this field (Costas and Yegros-Yegros 2013;Grassano et al 2017;Koier and Horlings 2015;Álvarez-Bornstein et al 2017). For this reason, we have considered the rate of publications where the funding agency appears in the paper.…”

Discrepancies among Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed coverage of funding information in medical journal articles

“…A previous study of 7,510 publications reporting UK cancer research in 2011 showed that WoS identified approximately 93% of funding data correctly, whereas PubMed correctly identified less than 50% of funding data. This same study also revealed the existence of a small number of publications in the WoS database that claimed funding but did not actually receive it [ 8 ]. Additionally, since 2008, WoS has been collecting funding information by indexing the source text directly from the journal articles [ 13 ], which might partially explain why more FAs were identified in WoS than in the other 2 databases.…”

“…Consequently, knowledge about funding patterns found in funding statements could be of vital importance to researchers who are seeking grants and others who are interested in assessing the impact and outcomes of funding [ 7 ]. Funding patterns can be used for strategic intelligence applications, such as mapping funding landscapes and generating funding organization portfolios [ 8 ], and can be used to identify top-funded topics and themes, acquire lists of funding organizations, and locate successful grant holders for possible collaboration.…”