School of Public Administration and Policy, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, China.
PLoS One. 2022 Feb 25;17(2):e0264070. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264070. eCollection 2022.
Under the current universal trend towards larger grant sizes in research funding systems, we focus on how large of a grant size is appropriate. We study the directional returns to scale (RTS) to assess whether current grant sizes are the most productive. We take the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) as an example and select three samples of physics, geography and management for an empirical study. We find that the optimal input direction and the most productive grant size scale is different for the three disciplines; based on the current grant size, physics should not expand the grant size and team size input, geography should further increase the grant size to improve performance and management should further expand the team size rather than the grant size. In this paper, we demonstrate a new method to calculate the optimal direction, which is the lowest rate of congestion, according to the characteristics of the General Program. Based on these results, we also calculate the most productive scale size. This method has certain value for project management.
在当前研究资助体系中 Grantsize 普遍增大的趋势下，我们关注 Grantsize 多大才合适。我们研究了规模报酬递增（RTS），以评估当前 Grantsize 是否最具生产力。我们以国家自然科学基金面上项目为例，选择物理、地理和管理三个学科进行实证研究。我们发现三个学科的最优投入方向和最具生产力的 Grantsize 规模不同；基于当前 Grantsize，物理学科不应扩大 Grantsize 和团队规模投入，地理学科应进一步增加 Grantsize 以提高绩效，管理学科应进一步扩大团队规模而不是 Grantsize。本文根据面上项目的特点，展示了一种根据拥堵率最低计算最优方向的新方法。根据这些结果，我们还计算了最具生产力的规模大小。这种方法对于项目管理具有一定的价值。
