Science of Science Funding - Background Research
Background Papers
The Initiative has produced two background papers for the user community that guide the design of infrastructure for evaluating the selection of funded research projects.
Impact Evaluation for Science Funding
Best Practices for Funding Early Careers of Scientists: Evidence and Unanswered Questions
Research Papers on the Science of Science Funding
This is a short bibliography of research papers that might be helpful to anyone who is learning about the science of science funding:
• Ahmadpoor, Mohammad, and Benjamin F. Jones. Decoding team and individual impact in science and invention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.28 (2019): 13885-13890. This paper measures empirically how the innate ability of individual researchers combines to form the ‘quality’ of research teams, as indicated by the citation impact of both scientific articles and patents. (Summary of Decoding team and individual impact in science and invention.)
• Arora, A., & Gambardella, A. (2005). The impact of NSF support for basic research in economics. Annales d’Economie et de Statistique, Contributions in memory of Zvi Griliches, 91–117. This paper assesses the impact of public research funding by comparing the publication success of economists funded by NSF to those who applied but we’re not funded. (Summary of The impact of NSF support for basic research in economics)
• Azoulay, P., Manso, G., & Graff Zivin, J. (2011). Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences. RAND Journal of Economics Vol. 42, No. 3 (2011): 527-554. This paper examines the pace, impact, and direction of research produced under NIH R01 grants and HHMI Investigator grants. (Summary of Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences)
• Azoulay, P., Zivin, J. S. G., Li, D., & Sampat, B. N. (2015). Public R&D investments and private-sector patenting: evidence from NIH funding rules. The Review of Economic Studies National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from NBER Working Paper 20889. This paper looks at the extent to which private-sector patenting can be associated with funding of specific research areas by the NIH. (Summary of Public R&D investments and private-sector patenting: evidence from NIH funding rules).
• Boudreau, K. J., Guinan, E. C., Lakhani, K. R., & Riedl, C. (2016). Looking across and looking beyond the knowledge frontier: Intellectual distance, novelty, and resource allocation in science. Management Science, 62(10), 2765-2783. This study examines how the closeness of reviewers' own research to the topic of a research proposal affects their evaluation of the proposal. (Summary of Looking across and looking beyond the knowledge frontier: Intellectual distance, novelty, and resource allocation in science)
• Bush, Vannevar. 1945. Science: The Endless Frontier. Washington, DC: US General Printing Office.
• Dasgupta, Partha and Paul A. David (1994). Toward a new economics of science. Research policy 23, no. 5 (1994): 487-521. This paper lays out a conceptual framework for analyzing the incentives and performance of scientific as distinct from technological research. (Summary of Toward a new economics of science)
• Ganguli, Ina. (2017). Saving Soviet Science: The Impact of Grants When Government R&D Funding Disappears. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9 (2): 165-201. This paper evaluates the impact of public research funding by examining the experience of scientists impacted by the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of whom received emergency funding from George Soros through the International Science Foundation. (Summary of The Impact of Grants When Government R&D Funding Disappears)
• Gush, J., Jaffe, A. B., Larsen, V., & Laws, A. (2015). The Effect of Public Funding on Research Output: The New Zealand Marsden Fund. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from NBER Working Paper 21652. This paper evaluates the impact of public research funding by comparing the change in publication performance associated with receiving funding to the change in publication performance associated with applying for funding but not receiving it. (Summary of The Effect of Public Funding on Research Output: The New Zealand Marsden Fund)
• Jaffe, A. B. (2002). Building programme evaluation into the design of public research-support programmes. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 18(1), 22–34. This paper discusses the conceptual and empirical challenges of evaluating public research support. (Summary of Building programme evaluation into the design of public research-support programmes)
• Myers, Kyle (2018). The Elasticity of Science. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3176991.
This study uses NIH RFAs ('Request for Applications') in particular areas to measure how much scientists change the direction of their research in response to directed funding opportunities. (Summary of The Elasticity of Science)
• Nelson, R. R. (1959). The simple economics of basic scientific research. Journal of political economy, 67(3), 297-306.
This paper provides a classic analysis of the economics of basic research. (Summary of The simple economics of basic scientific research)
• OECD Global Science Forum (2018). Effective operation of competitive research funding systems. https://doi.org/10.1787/2ae8c0dc-en This report provides results of a survey of OECD members on how they run research grant processes, and whether they have undertaken any evaluation of their approaches.
• Stephan, P. E. (1996). The economics of science. Journal of Economic literature, 34(3), 1199-1235. This paper synthesizes research on the incentive structure of science and its consequences, and the scientific labor market. (Summary of The economics of science)
• Stephan, Paula E. How economics shapes science. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Wang, J, Veugelers, R., Stephan, P. 2017, Bias against novelty in science: a cautionary tale for users of bibliometric indicators, Research Policy, 46, 1416-1436. Also published as NBER Working Paper 22180; See also NBER Digest Article. This paper proposes a new metric for novelty of scientific research, based on a measure of diversity of the references cited by papers, and examines how papers that score high on this metric compare in terms of other impact measures. (Summary of Bias against novelty in science: a cautionary tale for users of bibliometric indicators)