Abstract
One of the main problems in scientometrics is to explore the factors that affect the growth of citations in publications to identify best practices of research policy to increase the diffusion of scientific research and knowledge in science and society. The principal purpose of this study is to analyze how research funding affects the citation-based performance of scientific output in vital research fields of life science, which is a critical province (area of knowledge) in science to improve the wellbeing of people. This study uses data from the Scopus database in 2015 (to assess the impact on citations in 2021, after more than 5 years) concerning different disciplines of life science, given by “agricultural and biological sciences”, “biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology”, “Immunology and microbiology”, “neuroscience” and “pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutics”. Results demonstrate that although journals publish un-funded articles more than funded publications in all disciplines of life science, the fraction of total citations in funded papers is higher than the share in the total number of publications. In short, funded documents receive more citations than un-funded papers in all research fields of life science under study. Findings also support that citations of total (funded + un-funded), funded, and un-funded published papers have a power-law distribution in all five research fields of life science. Original results here reveal a general property in scientific development: funded research has a higher scaling potential than un-funded publications. Critical implications of research policy, systematized in a decision-making matrix, suggest that R&D investments in “Neuroscience” can generate a positive impact of scientific results in science and society-in terms of citations-higher than other research fields in medicine. Overall, then, results here can explain some characteristics driving scientific change and help policymakers and scholars to allocate resources towards research fields that facilitate the development and diffusion of scientific research and knowledge in life science for positive societal impact.
Highlights
Several studies in scientometrics have investigated the role of different factors in scientific change, such as public research labs, publications, emerging research fields, nations’ research performance, etc. (Coccia, 2005a, 2005b, 2009, 2019a; Coccia et al, 2015; Pagliaro & Coccia, 2021; Radicchi et al, 2008; Yan et al, 2018; Zhao et al, 2018)
Results show 65,734 documents in 534 journals of Immunology and Microbiology, in which 46.29% of citations accounted for 33.24% of all documents, which are funded papers
This study explores the relationship between research funding and the citation-based performance of scientific output in research fields of life science
Summary
Several studies in scientometrics have investigated the role of different factors in scientific change, such as public research labs, publications, emerging research fields, nations’ research performance, etc. (Coccia, 2005a, 2005b, 2009, 2019a; Coccia et al, 2015; Pagliaro & Coccia, 2021; Radicchi et al, 2008; Yan et al, 2018; Zhao et al, 2018). Several studies in scientometrics have investigated the role of different factors in scientific change, such as public research labs, publications, emerging research fields, nations’ research performance, etc. The scientific performance of papers has been investigated by many scholars, such as Li et al (2013) that focus on the role of authorship network’s impact on publication performance. Other studies investigate the impact of multiple funding on citation performance (MacLean, 1998), the impact factor of journals (Campanario et al, 2011), the relationship between public/private funding and scientific production in nanotechnology (Beaudry, 2012), the role of research sponsorship on research performance in nanoscience (Wang & Shapira, 2011), etc. Checchi (2019) introduces a performance-based research funding system and analyzes its effect on the quantity and quality of different nations’ publications. Heyard et al (2021) analyze the relationship between funding and authors’ altered metrics scores and show that funded studies got more public attention than other studies
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