Department of Political Science, Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Faculty of Management, School of Information Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.
PLoS One. 2021 May 12;16(5):e0251488. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0251488. eCollection 2021.
Research funding is an important factor for public science. Funding may affect which research topics get addressed, and what research outputs are produced. However, funding has often been studied simplistically, using top-down or system-led perspectives. Such approaches often restrict analysis to confined national funding landscapes or single funding organizations and instruments in isolation. This overlooks interlinkages, broader funding researchers might access, and trends of growing funding complexity. This paper instead frames a 'bottom-up' approach that analytically distinguishes between increasing levels of aggregation of funding instrument co-use. Funding of research outputs is selected as one way to test this approach, with levels traced via funding acknowledgements (FAs) in papers published 2009-18 by researchers affiliated to Denmark, the Netherlands or Norway, in two test research fields (Food Science, Renewable Energy Research). Three funding aggregation levels are delineated: at the bottom, 'funding configurations' of funding instruments co-used by individual researchers (from single-authored papers with two or more FAs); a middle, 'funding amalgamations' level, of instruments co-used by collaborating researchers (from multi-authored papers with two or more FAs); and a 'co-funding network' of instruments co-used across all researchers active in a research field (all papers with two or more FAs). All three levels are found to include heterogenous funding co-use from inside and outside the test countries. There is also co-funding variety in terms of instrument 'type' (public, private, university or non-profit) and 'origin' (domestic, foreign or supranational). Limitations of the approach are noted, as well as its applicability for future analyses not using paper FAs to address finer details of research funding dynamics.
研究经费是公共科学的一个重要因素。经费可能会影响到哪些研究课题得到解决，以及产生哪些研究成果。然而，经费的研究往往过于简单化，采用自上而下或系统主导的视角。这种方法往往将分析局限于特定国家的经费格局或单一的经费组织和工具，忽略了相互关联的、更广泛的经费来源，以及经费日益复杂的趋势。本文提出了一种“自下而上”的方法，从分析上区分了经费工具组合使用的聚合程度的增加。研究成果的经费资助被选为测试这种方法的一种方式，通过在丹麦、荷兰或挪威的研究人员 2009-18 年发表的论文中的经费致谢（FA）来追踪各个层次，这些论文涉及两个测试研究领域（食品科学、可再生能源研究）。界定了三个经费聚合层次：底层是单个研究人员共同使用的经费工具的“经费配置”（来自有两个或更多 FA 的单作者论文）；中层是合作研究人员共同使用的经费工具的“经费合并”层次（来自有两个或更多 FA 的多作者论文）；以及一个研究领域内所有活跃研究人员共同使用的经费工具的“共同资助网络”（所有有两个或更多 FA 的论文）。在所有三个层次上，都发现了来自测试国家内外的异质经费组合使用。在工具“类型”（公共、私人、大学或非营利）和“来源”（国内、国外或超国家）方面，也存在共同资助的多样性。本文还指出了该方法的局限性，以及它在未来分析中应用的适用性，这些分析不使用论文 FA 来解决研究经费动态的更详细细节。
