School of Information Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States of America.
Academic Analytics Research Center, Columbus, OH, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2023 Jun 16;18(6):e0286991. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0286991. eCollection 2023.
Some states in the U.S. have traditionally received less federal research funding than other states. The National Science Foundation (NSF) created a program in 1979, called the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to enhance the research competitiveness in such states. While the geographic disparity in federal research funding is well known, the overall impact of federal funding on the research performance of EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR has not been previously studied. In the current study, we compared the combined research productivity of Ph.D. granting institutions in EPSCoR versus the non-EPSCoR states to better understand the scientific impact of federal investments in sponsored research across all states. The research outputs we measured included journal articles, books, conference papers, patents, and citation count in academic literature. Unsurprisingly, results indicated that the non-EPSCoR states received significantly more federal research funding than their EPSCoR counterparts, which correlated with a higher number of faculty members in the non-EPSCoR versus EPSCoR states. Also, in the overall research productivity expressed on a per capita, the non-EPSCoR states fared better than EPSCoR states. However, when the research output was measured based on per $1M investment of federal research funding, EPSCoR states performed significantly better than the non-EPSCoR states in many research productivity indicators, with the notable exception of patents. Together, this study found preliminary evidence that EPSCoR states achieved a high degree of research productivity despite receiving significantly fewer federal research dollars. The limitations and next steps of this study are also discussed.
美国的一些州历来获得的联邦研究资金比其他州少。美国国家科学基金会（NSF）于 1979 年创建了一个名为“实验性刺激竞争研究计划”（EPSCoR）的计划，旨在提高这些州的研究竞争力。虽然联邦研究资金的地域差距是众所周知的，但联邦资金对 EPSCoR 和非 EPSCoR 州的研究绩效的总体影响尚未得到研究。在当前的研究中，我们比较了 EPSCoR 州和非 EPSCoR 州授予博士学位的机构的综合研究生产力，以更好地了解联邦投资对所有州赞助研究的科学影响。我们衡量的研究产出包括期刊文章、书籍、会议论文、专利和学术文献中的引文计数。不出所料，结果表明，非 EPSCoR 州获得的联邦研究资金明显多于其 EPSCoR 州的对应州，这与非 EPSCoR 州的教职员工人数多于 EPSCoR 州的情况有关。此外，在人均表示的整体研究生产力方面，非 EPSCoR 州的表现优于 EPSCoR 州。然而，当根据联邦研究资金每 100 万美元投资的研究产出进行衡量时，EPSCoR 州在许多研究生产力指标上的表现明显优于非 EPSCoR 州，专利除外。总的来说，这项研究初步发现，尽管 EPSCoR 州获得的联邦研究资金明显较少，但它们实现了高度的研究生产力。本研究还讨论了其局限性和下一步措施。
