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The funding factor: a cross-disciplinary examination of the association between research funding and citation impact

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Abstract

This paper intends to illuminate the relationship between science funding and citation impact in seven STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine). Using a regression model with Heckman bias correction, we find that funding has a positive, significant association with a paper’s citations in STEMM fields. Further analyses show that this association is magnified by the factors of multiple authorship and multiple institutions. For funded papers in STEM, multi-author and multi-institution papers tend to receive even more citations than single-authored and single-institution papers; however, funded papers in Medicine received less gain in citation impact when either factor is considered. Based on the finding that funding support has a stronger association with citation impact when it is treated as a binary variable than as a count variable, this paper recommends the allocation of funding to researchers without active funding support, instead of giving awards to those with multiple funding supports at hand.

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Notes

  1.  In our original data collection, we also included several social science and humanity domains; however, during analyses, we realized that the percentage of papers with funding acknowledgement in these domains was rather inconsistent. We believe this is an artifact caused by the inconsistent coverage of the database, as pointed out by (Álvarez-Bornstein et al. 2017; Tang et al. 2017) and decided to only focus on STEMM domains.

  2.  Hirst’s selection method did not converge for Environmental Studies because of the interdisciplinary nature of this domain. Instead, we manually picked five journals based on the citation relations of Nature Climate Change and Global Environmental Change.

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Acknowledgements

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant Award Number: RE-07-15-0060-15), for the project titled “Building an entity-based research framework to enhance digital services on knowledge discovery and delivery”. This work was also partly supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015S1A3A2046711).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Erjia Yan

  2. LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Chaojiang Wu

  3. Department of Library and Information Science, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, 03722, Korea

    Min Song

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Correspondence to Erjia Yan.

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Yan, E., Wu, C. & Song, M. The funding factor: a cross-disciplinary examination of the association between research funding and citation impact. Scientometrics 115, 369–384 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2583-8

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