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This article presents a survey of published literature about various quality costing approaches and reports of their success in order to provide a better understanding of cost of quality (CoQ) methods. Even though the literature review shows an interest by the academic community, a CoQ approach is not utilized in most quality management programs. Nevertheless, evidence is presented which shows that companies that do adopt a CoQ concept are successful in reducing quality costs and improving quality for their customers. The survey shows that the method most commonly implemented is the classical prevention-appraisal-failure (P-A-F) model; however, other quality cost models are used with success as well. The selected CoQ model must suit the situation, the environment, the purpose and the needs of the company in order to have a chance to become a successful systematic tool in a quality management program.

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.

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