How to Receive More Funding for Your Research? Get Connected to the Right People!

Abstract

Funding has been viewed in the literature as one of the main determinants of scientific activities. Also, at an individual level, securing funding is one of the most important factors for a researcher, enabling him/her to carry out research projects. However, not everyone is successful in obtaining the necessary funds. The main objective of this work is to measure the effect of several important factors such as past productivity, scientific collaboration or career age of researchers, on the amount of funding that is allocated to them. For this purpose, the paper estimates a temporal non-linear multiple regression model. According to the results, although past productivity of researchers positively affects the funding level, our findings highlight the significant role of networking and collaboration. It was observed that being a member of large scientific teams and getting connected to productive researchers who have also a good control over the collaboration network and the flow of information can increase the chances for securing more money. In fact, our results show that in the quest for the research money it is more important how researchers build their collaboration network than what publications they produce and whether they are cited.

Fig 1. Average funding per distinct researcher, 1996 to 2010.

Fig 2

a) Average number of papers per researcher, 1996 to 2010, b) Average number of papers versus average funding, 1996 to 2010.

Fig 3. Example of the procedure for counting the citations received by the articles.

Fig 4

a) 3-year average citation counts, 1996 to 2008, b) Normalized 3-year average citation counts versus normalized average funding, 1996 to 2008.

Fig 5. Network structure variables at the aggregate level.

Fig 6. Normalized average funding per distinct researcher versus career age.