Getting to the bottom of research funding: Acknowledging the complexity of funding dynamics

Abstract

<p>This paper takes a ‘bottom-up’ approach to research funding studies, using individual researchers as an entry point, and explores associated funding dynamics using funding acknowledgements (FAs). In doing so it addresses weaknesses found in traditional top-down/system-led perspectives that can, by giving primacy to national funding landscapes and single funding organisations or instruments, portray funding arrangements too simplistically. Instead we reveal that funding mobilized to carry out research, in two illustrative fields, is more diverse than typically depicted. First, we map field-level ‘co-funding networks’ that do not resemble nationally-confined funding landscapes. Rather they represent multi-layered, boundary-spanning, co-funding of published research. Second, we draw attention to ‘funding amalgamations’ – the sum of all authors’ reported funding per article. These are heterogeneous, with assortments of funding type (public, private, university or non-profit) and origin (domestic, foreign or supranational). Our approach acknowledges the complexity of contemporary funding arrangements and may improve understanding of how research activities may be contextually mediated by such funding realities. We note our approach’s limitations, advocate its use to complement and enhance existing techniques, then discuss directions to develop it further.</p>

Tracing researcher 'funding configurations': Some initial approaches and challenges

“…Renewable Energy Research and Food Science. Both have wide-ranging topics (see Aagaard et al 2020). They therefore engage a diverse, broad and perhaps more challenging to characterise range of funders and funding instruments than more traditional, disciplinary-oriented fields.…”

“…Moving to these more complex funding dynamics, we need to consider how to develop ideas not only about how funding configurations are bounded and composed, but also about whether and how a researcher's configuration interacts with those of others, i.e. once they become amalgamated, for instance whenever they are co-mobilised in collaborative activity, like co-authoring a paper (elsewhere we have begun to conceptualise these additional dynamics as 'funding amalgamations', and to highlight the further existence of 'co-funding networks' emerging from them at larger scale; see Aagaard et al 2020).…”

“…We sampled and selected funding information from a bespoke dataset we compiled. This contained FAs from publications in two research fields delineated via keywords to be Renewable Energy Research, and Food Science (see Aagaard et al 2020). We included author address details in our dataset so we could select researchers affiliated to our sample countries: Denmark, Netherlands and Norway.…”

“…One key consequence is researchers may no longer be able to satisfy their resource needs through single funder support alone. Increasingly they may co-fund their research by combining assorted inputs from multiple funders (Aagaard et al 2020).…”

“…We often cannot attribute FAs to specific researchers for multi-authored papers. Here FA texts offer an aggregated, undifferentiated record (of 'funding amalgamations', not funding configurations; see Aagaard et al 2020). We therefore focus upon single-authored papers, where we know FAs relate to one, known researcher (i.e.…”