Abstract
Agencies that fund scientific research must choose: is it more effective to give large grants to a few elite researchers, or small grants to many researchers? Large grants would be more effective only if scientific impact increases as an accelerating function of grant size. Here, we examine the scientific impact of individual university-based researchers in three disciplines funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We considered four indices of scientific impact: numbers of articles published, numbers of citations to those articles, the most cited article, and the number of highly cited articles, each measured over a four-year period. We related these to the amount of NSERC funding received. Impact is positively, but only weakly, related to funding. Researchers who received additional funds from a second federal granting council, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, were not more productive than those who received only NSERC funding. Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be more productive.
Highlights
Consider a publically-funded research granting council with a fixed amount of money at its disposal
Does greater funding for high performers lead to greater scientific impact, versus funding more researchers?
The impact of individual researchers increased with the amount of NSERC funding they had received
Summary
Consider a publically-funded research granting council with a fixed amount of money at its disposal. The goal of the funding program could be to maximize the summed impact of a scientific community (e.g., university researchers). Optimal allocation of research funds in this case depends upon the shape of the relationship between the scientific impact of individual grantees and their funding.
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