Grant Support as a Research Development Factor in Russian Universities

Scientific research at the present stage of development of higher education is the basis of the academic reputation of the university, an aspect of the educational activities of the teacher and student. Quantitative indicators of scientific performance are the most important criterion for evaluating effectiveness at different levels. The article analyzes the implementation of scientific research based on grant support for four of the most authoritative foundations in Russia in 2006-2020: the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation, the Council for Grants of the President of the Russian Federation and the Russian Science Foundation. The assessment was made on the example of projects in the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics. The conclusion of the study introduces a statement of the importance of funds for the preservation of classical areas of scientific activity. It also demonstrates the necessity of an increase in the number of scientific research at Russian universities funded by these funds both in general terms and in relation to the number of grant projects conducted at academic institutions and an assessment of the activities of funds as a structure that determines priority directions of research. The most popular contests for universities have become contests in the areas of fundamental research and research support for young scientists.

ALIS: A novel metric in lineage-independent evaluation of scholars

Evaluative bibliometrics often attempts to explore various methods to measure individual scholarly influence. Scholarly independence (SI) is a unique indicator that can be used to understand and assess the research performances of individual scholars. The SI is a rare quality that most funding agencies and universities seek during funding decisions or hiring processes. We propose author lineage independent score (ALIS), a unique model to measure SI of a scholar by using his or her academic genealogy tree as the underlying graph structure. The analysis is performed on real data of 100 authors, collected from the Web of Science (WoS) and the Mathematics Genealogy Project. The analysis is further validated on a larger scale, on a simulated sample of 10,000 authors. The simulation exercise is the proof-of-concept for scalability of the metric and the proposed optimisation model. ALIS exploits genealogical relationships between scholars and their mentors and collaborating communities and constructs an influence scoring model based on the Genealogy tree structure of the respective scholars. The implications from the theoretical model are found to be profound in tracing known and recursive citation patterns among peers. The genealogy tree is used to investigate the advisor–advisee relationship and lays the foundation for defining metrics used to calculate the various indicators such as non-genealogy citations (NGCs), non-community citations (NCCs) and other citation quotient (OCQ). As these indicators/parameters are novel and thus not readily accessible, algorithms are written to compute these indicator values for the scholars under study.

Researcher Performance in Scopus Articles (RPSA) as a New Scientometric Model of Scientific Output: Tested in Business Area of V4 Countries

The purpose of this study is to present a new scientometric model for measuring individual scientific performance in Scopus article publications in the field of Business, Management, and Accounting (BMA). With the help of this model, the study also compares the publication performance of the top 50 researchers according to SciVal in the field of BMA, in each of the Central European V4 countries (Czech Republic; Hungary; Poland; Slovakia). To analyze the scientific excellence of a total of top 200 researchers in the countries studied, we collected and analyzed the data of a total of 1844 partially redundant and a total of 1492 cleansed BMA publications. In the scope of the study, we determined the quality of the journals using SCImago, the individual contributions to the journal articles, and the number of citations using Scopus data. A comparison of individual performance, as shown by published journal articles, can be made based on the qualities of the journals, the determination of the aggregated co-authorship ratios, and the number of citations received. The performance of BMA researchers in Hungary lags behind the average of V4s in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality it reaches this average. As for BMA journal articles, the average number of co-authors is between two and three; concerning Q4 to Q2 publications, this number typically increases. In fact, in the case of these Q journals multiple co-authorship results in higher citations, but it is not the case concerning Q1 journals.

European Research Council: excellence and leadership over time from a gender perspective

European Research Council Grants (ERC) have become the most important vehicle for funding scientific research in the EU. Since their creation in 2007, they have provided funding for around 7,000 of the nearly 70,000 proposals for research projects submitted. With a success rate of about 11%, these Grants are highly competitive. Despite major advancement of women’s participation in research activity, women overall remain the minority in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM disciplines). Against that backdrop, this article analyses men’s and women’s presence in ERC Grants. The gender balance in the ERC Grant, have been examined in three dimensions: Excellence Awarded; Scientific Leadership Position; and Time Series Evolution. The results show that female presence is lower than men as submitted (26% vs 74%), granted (22% vs 78%), expert panel members (28% vs 72%), and as a panel chair (26% vs 74%). State-space prediction of the future pattern of these grants shows that time has no clearly beneficial effect on women’s participation as applicants, granted, expert panel members or panel chairs, particularly in the area of Physics and Engineering.

Effects of seniority, gender and geography on the bibliometric output and collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) grant recipients

Assessing the success and performance of researchers is a difficult task, as their grant output is influenced by a series of factors, including seniority, gender and geographical location of their host institution. In order to assess the effects of these factors, we analysed the publication and citation outputs, using Scopus and Web of Science, and the collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) starting (junior) and advanced (senior) grantees. For this study, we used a cohort of 355 grantees from the Life Sciences domain of years 2007–09. While senior grantees had overall greater publication output, junior grantees had a significantly greater pre-post grant award increase in their overall number of publications and in those on which they had last authorship. The collaboration networks size and the number of sub-communities increased for all grantees, although more pronounced for juniors, as they departed from smaller and more compact pre-award co-authorship networks. Both junior and senior grantees increased the size of the community within which they were collaborating in the post-award period. Pre-post grant award performance of grantees was not related to gender, although male junior grantees had more publications than female grantees before and after the grant award. Junior grantees located in lower research-performing countries published less and had less diverse collaboration networks than their peers located in higher research-performing countries. Our study suggests that research environment has greater influence on post-grant award publications than gender especially for junior grantees. Also, collaboration networks may be a useful complement to publication and citation outputs for assessing post-grant research performance, especially for grantees who already have a high publication output and who get highly competitive grants such as those from ERC.

Impact of research investment on scientific productivity of junior researchers

There is a demand for providing evidence on the effectiveness of research investments on the promotion of novice researchers' scientific productivity and production of research with new initiatives and innovations. We used a mixed method approach to evaluate the funding effect of the New Investigator Fund (NIF) by comparing scientific productivity between award recipients and non-recipients. We reviewed NIF grant applications submitted from 2004 to 2013. Scientific productivity was assessed by confirming the publication of the NIF-submitted application. Online databases were searched, independently and in duplicate, to locate the publications. Applicants' perceptions and experiences were collected through a short survey and categorized into specified themes. Multivariable logistic regression was performed. Odds ratios (OR) with 95 % confidence intervals (CI) are reported. Of 296 applicants, 163 (55 %) were awarded. Gender, affiliation, and field of expertise did not affect funding decisions. More physicians with graduate education (32.0 %) and applicants with a doctorate degree (21.5 %) were awarded than applicants without postgraduate education (9.8 %). Basic science research (28.8 %), randomized controlled trials (24.5 %), and feasibility/pilot trials (13.3 %) were awarded more than observational designs (p   <  0.001). Adjusting for applicants and application factors, awardees published the NIF application threefold more than non-awardees (OR = 3.4, 95 %, CI = 1.9, 5.9). The survey response rate was 90.5 %, and only 58 % commented on their perceptions, successes, and challenges of the submission process. These findings suggest that research investments as small as seed funding are effective for scientific productivity and professional growth of novice investigators and production of research with new initiatives and innovations. Further efforts are recommended to enhance the support of small grant funding programs.

Bias in Research Grant Evaluation Has Dire Consequences for Small Universities

Federal funding for basic scientific research is the cornerstone of societal progress, economy, health and well-being. There is a direct relationship between financial investment in science and a nation's scientific discoveries, making it a priority for governments to distribute public funding appropriately in support of the best science. However, research grant proposal success rate and funding level can be skewed toward certain groups of applicants, and such skew may be driven by systemic bias arising during grant proposal evaluation and scoring. Policies to best redress this problem are not well established. Here, we show that funding success and grant amounts for applications to Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant program (2011-2014) are consistently lower for applicants from small institutions. This pattern persists across applicant experience levels, is consistent among three criteria used to score grant proposals, and therefore is interpreted as representing systemic bias targeting applicants from small institutions. When current funding success rates are projected forward, forecasts reveal that future science funding at small schools in Canada will decline precipitously in the next decade, if skews are left uncorrected. We show that a recently-adopted pilot program to bolster success by lowering standards for select applicants from small institutions will not erase funding skew, nor will several other post-evaluation corrective measures. Rather, to support objective and robust review of grant applications, it is necessary for research councils to address evaluation skew directly, by adopting procedures such as blind review of research proposals and bibliometric assessment of performance. Such measures will be important in restoring confidence in the objectivity and fairness of science funding decisions. Likewise, small institutions can improve their research success by more strongly supporting productive researchers and developing competitive graduate programming opportunities.