Comparing the Scientific Quality Achieved by Funding Instruments for Single Grant Holders and for Collaborative Networks within a Research System: Some Observations

Increasingly, funding of academic research is carried out through the support of collaboration, rather than through single awards to a sole grant holder. The practice is well supported by evidence that larger, network-based research achieve high quality while leading to a number of capacity building benefits for the research system, although with significant transaction costs. However, the question of what kind of funding schemes should be made available to researchers is not a simple dichotomy between single grant-holder projects and networks. A key question is how to achieve a balance in each subject field between different forms of funding instrument employed while ensuring different forms of funding retain a reputation for generating research of high scientific quality. This paper reports the results of a systematic comparison of the scientific quality of 1010 ISI scientific papers produced under two contrasting forms of funding instrument for a single year in the Austrian science system. Comparison of the arcsinh transformed citation counts of papers from the two main forms of funding for basic science at the level of main scientific field shows there is no statistically significant difference in the quality achieved by the two forms of funding. This may suggest that funders and research performers have deliberately ensured that different research instruments nevertheless achieve very similar levels of scientific excellence.