Abstract
Much attention has been paid to estimating the impact of investments in scientific research. Historically, those efforts have been largely ad hoc, burdensome, and error prone. In addition, the focus has been largely mechanical—drawing a direct line between funding and outputs—rather than focusing on the scientists that do the work. Here, we provide an illustrative application of a new approach that examines the impact of research funding on individuals and their scientific output in terms of publications, citations, collaborations, and international activity, controlling for both observed and unobserved factors. We argue that full engagement between scientific funders and the research community is needed if we are to expand the data infrastructure to enable a more scientific assessment of scientific investments.
Highlights
There is great interest in evaluating the impact of investments in science (Bernanke, 2011; Marburger, 2005)
We provide an illustrative application of a new approach that examines the impact of research funding on individuals and their scientific output in terms of publications, citations, collaborations, and international activity, controlling for both observed and unobserved factors
We argue that full engagement between scientific funders and the research community is needed if we are to expand the data infrastructure to enable a more scientific assessment of scientific investments
Summary
There is great interest in evaluating the impact of investments in science (Bernanke, 2011; Marburger, 2005). This paper describes a modern data-driven approaches and empirical methodology that can be used to improve evidence-based research evaluation It provides an illustrative example of the utility of these methods by evaluating an agency funding cancer research in France—the Institut National du Cancer (INCa). The pilot confirmed the feasibility of the approach and contributed to identify the building blocks of an integrated system that could be used to assess the impact of INCa funding in the long term (i.e., long after the completion of the projects) The success of this pilot project was acknowledged when the 2014–2019 National Cancer Plan mandated INCa to “develop shared tools for the evaluation of research projects in oncology.” The main funders of scientific and clinical research in France were invited to collaborate and responded with great interest. We find that full engagement of scientific funders with the research community to expand data capacity and evaluation tools would be a fruitful approach to enable a more scientific assessment of scientific investments
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