Evolution of Research on funding inequality in science: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Funding inequality in the research community is a topic of widespread research interest. Research on funding inequality has evolved rapidly over time, yet there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of current research on this topic. We obtained 911 scientific papers published in 1990 – 2023 from the Web of Science core dataset and used bibliometric analysis to examine the evolution of the important issue of funding equality in the scientific research community. Specifically, we find that the number of papers about funding inequality has increased significantly in recent years. Among them, Scientometrics has published 29 papers related to funding inequality during the years. In addition, the results showed that Research Libraries UK ranked first in the number of outputs with a total of 77 publications related to funding inequality. Our research also goes a step further by identifying research experts in the field of funding inequality. Finally, the results of thematic clustering show that existing research related to funding inequality mainly revolves around issues such as gender differences, peer review, and productivity.