Societal targeting in researcher funding: An exploratory approach

Abstract

Shaping public research to enhance its societal contribution has become a key policy concern. Against this background, how research funding may stimulate the societal orientation of scientific research—or how funding is societally targeted—has been underexplored. This article proposes an exploratory approach to characterize societal targeting in individual researcher funding, based on four key societal targeting dimensions: interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, prioritized research problems and user-oriented outputs. All these targeting dimensions of funding can potentially shape both researchers’ research networks and practices towards societal goals. These dimensions can be identified in context by studying ex ante specifications of funding instruments, i.e. rules and conditions for funding provision to researchers. We illustrate the dimensions in various degrees using two real cases of national public research funding. This systematic perspective on funding instrument characteristics then can potentially improve research evaluation, by allowing assessment in more detail of which funding dimensions associate with particular kinds of research ultimately being undertaken.

Reframing study of research(er) funding towards configurations and trails

“…Researchers act and strategize about (co-)use of features their funding grants afford (Hellström & Jacob, 2017). They use their specialist knowledge to leverage funding to advance their cognitive career ambitions, to contribute to growth of their knowledge communities, and to satisfy research organisations, funders and evaluators (Gläser, 2019;Thomas et al, 2020;Ramos-Vielba et al, 2022).…”

“…They highlight international and interdisciplinary collaboration is growing, and that more 'team science' and massively-collaborative research is now being done, as evidenced by a rising hyper-authorship of papers in selected fields. Studies have observed funders increasingly prioritising cross-sectoral, trans-disciplinary working to tackle societal challenges, thus making research more complex (Shapira & Wang, 2010;Ioannidis et al, 2018;Adams et al, 2019;Schneider et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2019;Wang & Barabási, 2021;Ramos-Vielba et al, 2022). Such work, however, does not help us determine whether most researchers now face complicated funding situations.…”

“…This operationalises the 'funding instrument grant' as a relatively standardised unit for study. Table 1 lists descriptors that we expect are both registerable to characterise, and meaningful for any later study of potential influences for research(ers) -i.e., those arising from use of such funding instrument grants (Aagaard et al, 2021a;2021b;Ramos-Vielba et al, 2022).…”

“…Descriptors indicating which research practices and networks are funded are also proxies. They allow some consideration of which scientific and socio-economic needs and possibilities, political, administrative and societal stakeholders are associated with the funded research (c.f., Ramos-Vielba et al, 2022). They will enable a separate analytical focus on which specific actors were targeted to do and to (later) use the funded research, contrasted with what then actually happened.…”

“…Our frames address individual researchers. Yet we know much science is now done by organisation-based groups, pan-organisation teams, inter-or transdisciplinary collaborations, and across global knowledge networks (Hallonsten, 2014;Ioannidis et al, 2018;Adams et al, 2019;Aagaard et al, 2021a;Ramos-Vielba et al, 2022). Funding changes for collaborating researchers are therefore also important to consider.…”