scholarly journals Getting to the bottom of research funding: Acknowledging the complexity of funding dynamics

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. e0251488
Author(s):  
Kaare Aagaard ◽  
Philippe Mongeon ◽  
Irene Ramos-Vielba ◽  
Duncan Andrew Thomas

Research funding is an important factor for public science. Funding may affect which research topics get addressed, and what research outputs are produced. However, funding has often been studied simplistically, using top-down or system-led perspectives. Such approaches often restrict analysis to confined national funding landscapes or single funding organizations and instruments in isolation. This overlooks interlinkages, broader funding researchers might access, and trends of growing funding complexity. This paper instead frames a ‘bottom-up’ approach that analytically distinguishes between increasing levels of aggregation of funding instrument co-use. Funding of research outputs is selected as one way to test this approach, with levels traced via funding acknowledgements (FAs) in papers published 2009–18 by researchers affiliated to Denmark, the Netherlands or Norway, in two test research fields (Food Science, Renewable Energy Research). Three funding aggregation levels are delineated: at the bottom, ‘funding configurations’ of funding instruments co-used by individual researchers (from single-authored papers with two or more FAs); a middle, ‘funding amalgamations’ level, of instruments co-used by collaborating researchers (from multi-authored papers with two or more FAs); and a ‘co-funding network’ of instruments co-used across all researchers active in a research field (all papers with two or more FAs). All three levels are found to include heterogenous funding co-use from inside and outside the test countries. There is also co-funding variety in terms of instrument ‘type’ (public, private, university or non-profit) and ‘origin’ (domestic, foreign or supranational). Limitations of the approach are noted, as well as its applicability for future analyses not using paper FAs to address finer details of research funding dynamics.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaare Aagaard ◽  
Philippe Mongeon ◽  
Irene Ramos-Vielba ◽  
Duncan Andrew Thomas

Research funding is an important factor for public science. Funding can affect which research topics get addressed, and what research outputs are produced. However, funding has often been studied simplistically, using top-down or system-led perspectives. These can restrict analysis to national funding landscapes or single funding organisations and instruments in isolation. This overlooks interlinkages and potentially broader funding that researchers might access. We instead frame an alternative ‘bottom-up’ approach, using individual researchers as the entry point. For two test research fields (food science, renewable energy research) we analyse articles published 2009–18 as an example funded research activity. Here we trace researcher funding via article funding acknowledgements (FAs) of researchers affiliated to Denmark, the Netherlands or Norway. We then map field-level ‘co-funding networks’. These turn out to include heterogeneous funding from inside, outside and across these test countries. We further study article-level ‘funding amalgamations’ – the sum of all authors’ reported funding per article. These similarly show highly varied (co-)funding by funder ‘type’ (public, private, university or non-profit) and ‘origin’ (domestic, foreign or supranational). We note this approach has certain limitations but suggest it does advance our understanding of research funding dynamics. It provides an additional perspective, and appears adaptable to further analyses (e.g. of potential influences of co-funding). We lastly suggest several implications for science policy stemming from this bottom-up approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rea Ščepanović ◽  
Krishma Labib ◽  
Ivan Buljan ◽  
Joeri Tijdink ◽  
Ana Marušić

AbstractResearch integrity (RI) is a continuously developing concept, and increasing emphasis is put on creating RI promotion practices. This study aimed to map the existing RI guidance documents at research performing organisations (RPOs) and research funding organisations (RFOs). A search of bibliographic databases and grey literature sources was performed, and retrieved documents were screened for eligibility. The search of bibliographical databases and reference lists of selected articles identified a total of 92 documents while the search of grey literature sources identified 118 documents for analysis. The retrieved documents were analysed based on their geographical origin, research field and organisational origin (RPO or RFO) of RI practices, types of guidance presented in them, and target groups to which RI practices are directed. Most of the identified practices were developed for research in general, and are applicable to all research fields (n = 117) and medical sciences (n = 78). They were mostly written in the form of guidelines (n = 136) and targeted researchers (n = 167). A comprehensive search of the existing RI promotion practices showed that initiatives mostly come from RPOs while only a few RI practices originate from RFOs. This study showed that more RI guidance documents are needed for natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities since only a small number of documents was developed specifically for these research fields. The explored documents and the gaps in knowledge identified in this study can be used for further development of RI promotion practices in RPOs and RFOs.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Andrew Thomas ◽  
Irene Ramos-Vielba ◽  
Kaare Aagaard

Research funding of public science has been changing in recent decades. One consequence is researchers concurrently may have to use multiple funding sources with perhaps differing characteristics. Tracing these (co-)funding dynamics and how assorted funding mixes might influence research is important. Few approaches exist in previous literature to guide such an effort. This working paper takes initial steps by suggesting tracing approaches and undertaking exploratory fieldwork to refine them. To anchor our tracing, we propose a novel concept of the ‘funding configuration’ of ‘funding instruments’ (e.g. grants) concurrently held by a researcher at a particular time. We suggest ‘technical’ and ‘analytical’ categories to characterise these instruments, tracing who is funding research (‘type’ and ‘origin’) and for what aims (i.e. to generate ‘scholarly’ or ‘societal’ impacts). We trace selected funding dynamics in Renewable Energy Research and Food Science for researchers affiliated to Danish, Dutch and Norwegian public research organisations. We use funding acknowledgements (FAs) self-reported in papers specifically to study attributable funding configurations of researchers. These cases are filtered from a bespoke dataset of Web of Science FA metadata, covering 2009 to 2018. We characterise over 50 funding instruments and describe funding dynamics for 12 researchers, based on desk-based tracing, and gain insights from interviewing four researchers. We encounter challenges around limited public availability of funding data. Some of our tested categories to characterise funding instruments (whether funding is competitive and recurrent) prove difficult to determine while others (type and origin) are validated. Funding instruments held by researchers emerge as nuanced, with hybrid blends of ‘scholarly’ and ‘societal’ characteristics, rather than these being mutually exclusive. We finally propose revisions to address these characterisation challenges, and to trace more accurately researcher funding configurations in future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 1071-1077
Author(s):  
Aref G. Ghahsare ◽  
Zahra S. Nazifi ◽  
Seyed M.R. Nazifi

: Over the last decades, several heterocyclic derivatives compounds have been synthesized or extracted from natural resources and have been tested for their pharmaceutical activities. Xanthene is one of these heterocyclic derivatives. These compounds consist of an oxygen-containing central heterocyclic structure with two more cyclic structures fused to the central cyclic compound. It has been shown that xanthane derivatives are bioactive compounds with diverse activities such as anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory as well as therapeutic effects on diabetes and Alzheimer. The anti-cancer activity of such compounds has been one of the main research fields in pharmaceutical chemistry. Due to this diverse biological activity, xanthene core derivatives are still an attractive research field for both academia and industry. This review addresses the current finding on the biological activities of xanthene derivatives and discussed in detail some aspects of their structure-activity relationship (SAR).


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-59
Author(s):  
Suzanne Adema

Abstract Empirical research on the learning and instruction of Latin is still scarce. In this article, relevant research is surveyed, along with publications that report experiences of classics teachers or provide teaching suggestions. An overview is presented of where to find publications on the learning and instruction of Latin, as well as a brief introduction to several relevant research methods. The article is organized by reference to various research fields relevant to the learning and instruction of Latin. These fields are classics and Latin linguistics, second language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition and dictionary use, reading and text comprehension, translation research and pedagogy, child development and psychology.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
QIAN WANG

The research field of consumer behavior is not a new one. In fact, many researchers have conducted surveys and experiments in this field. Also, the topic on how advertisement influences consumer perceptions has been explored. It is obvious that culture background and social economic status are different between developed countries and developing countries. This can vary consumers’ perception and behaviors. Non-profit advertisement will influence consumer’s perception and behavior on the basis of cultural background. Thus, it will also be extremely crucial for non-profit advertisements to study cultural differences to learn more about consumers. This study focuses on cultural background, aiming to find the differences on how different non-profit advertisement between China and U.S., and provide useful strategies to plan non-profit advertisements.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dietze

Abstract. Environmental seismology is the study of the seismic signals emitted by Earth surface processes. This emerging research field is at the intersection of seismology, geomorphology, hydrology, meteorology, and further Earth science disciplines. It amalgamates a wide variety of methods from across these disciplines and ultimately fuses them in a common analysis environment. This overarching scope of environmental seismology requires a coherent yet integrative software which is accepted by many of the involved scientific disciplines. The statistic software R has gained paramount importance in the majority of data science research fields. R has well-justified advances over other mostly commercial software, which makes it the ideal language to base a comprehensive analysis toolbox on. The article introduces the avenues and needs of environmental seismology, and how these are met by the R package eseis. The conceptual structure, example data sets, and available functions are demonstrated. Worked examples illustrate possible applications of the package and in-depth descriptions of the flexible use of the functions. The package has a registered DOI, is available under the GPL licence on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), and is maintained on GitHub.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
Marco van Veller

Purpose This paper aims to the identification of journal articles that probably report on interdisciplinary research at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). Design/methodology/approach For identification of interdisciplinary research, an analysis is performed on journals from which articles have been cited in articles (co-)authored by WUR staff. The journals with cited articles are inventoried from the reference lists of the WUR articles. For each WUR article, a mean dissimilarity is calculated between the journal in which it has been published and the journals inventoried from the reference lists. Dissimilarities are derived from a large matrix with similarity values between journals, calculated from co-occurrence of these journals in the WUR articles’ reference lists. Findings For 21,191 WUR articles published between 2006 and 2015 in 2,535 journals mean dissimilarities have been calculated. The analysis shows that WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities often are published in multidisciplinary journals. Also, WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities are found in non-multidisciplinary (research field-specific) journals. For these articles (with high mean dissimilarities), this paper shows that citations are often made to more various research fields than for articles with lower mean dissimilarities. Originality/value Identification of articles reporting on interdisciplinary research may be important to WUR policy for strategic purposes or for the evaluation of researchers or groups. Also, this analysis enables to identify journals with high mean dissimilarities (due to WUR articles citing more various research fields). Identification of these journals with a more interdisciplinary scope can be important for collection management by the library.


Author(s):  
Mike Thelwall

Scientific Web Intelligence (SWI) is a research field that combines techniques from data mining, Web intelligence, and scientometrics to extract useful information from the links and text of academic-related Web pages using various clustering, visualization, and counting techniques. Its origins lie in previous scientometric research into mining off-line academic data sources such as journal citation databases. Typical scientometric objectives are either evaluative (assessing the impact of research) or relational (identifying patterns of communication within and among research fields). From scientometrics, SWI also inherits a need to validate its methods and results so that the methods can be justified to end users, and the causes of the results can be found and explained.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1349-1363
Author(s):  
David Osimo ◽  
Laia Pujol Priego ◽  
Riina Vuorikari

Funding affects how science is carried out. Over the last 50 years, the core of science funding has become competitive, project based and increasingly oriented towards societal challenges. Recently, alternative, more open and flexible funding mechanisms have emerged, such as crowdfunding, philanthropy and bottom-up mechanisms. This chapter analyses the development and implications of alternative funding mechanisms for science, through an umbrella literature review complemented by case studies. It concludes that alternative funding are an important component of research funding, which provides new opportunities especially for niche and unrecognized research, and require stronger communication skills by researchers. However, they can't and should not substitute traditional mechanisms. Researchers, institutions and funding agencies should redesign their activity accounting for a plurality of funding instruments, and facilitate collaboration between them.


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