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News & Views item - July 2013 |
Just in Case You Thought Picking Winners is Reducible to Metrics. (July 4,
2013)
Two Canadian researchers at the University of Ottawa publishing in PLOS One have analysed Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding.
As one of the authors, David Currie, succinctly put it: "Some very poorly funded people manage to do a great deal." Which really translates to -- when peer reviewers assess applications they must be competent to critically analyse the material put before them, just going by the numbers doesn't really cut it.
The 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.