Higher-order rich-club phenomenon in collaborative research grants

TL;DR

This study uncovers higher-order rich-club phenomena in collaborative research grants, showing that institutions forming dense collaboration clusters tend to produce more research output per dollar, highlighting the benefits of such networks.

Contribution

It extends the rich-club concept to bipartite networks of institutions and grants, revealing higher-order rich-clubs and their association with increased research productivity.

Findings

Rich clubs exist in bipartite networks of institutions and grants.

Institutions in rich clubs produce more research per dollar.

Rich-club grants involve collaborations among up to five institutions.

Abstract

Modern scientific work, including writing papers and submitting research grant proposals, increasingly involves researchers from different institutions. In grant collaborations, it is known that institutions involved in many collaborations tend to densely collaborate with each other, forming rich clubs. Here we investigate higher-order rich-club phenomena in collaborative research grants among institutions and their associations with research productivity. Using publicly available data from the National Science Foundation in the US, we construct a bipartite network of institutions and collaborative grants, which distinguishes among the collaboration with different numbers of institutions. By extending the concept and algorithms of the rich club for dyadic networks to the case of bipartite networks, we find rich clubs both in the entire bipartite network and the bipartite subnetwork induced by the collaborative grants involving a given number of institutions up to five. We also find that the collaborative grants within rich clubs tend to be more productive in a per-dollar sense than the control. Our results highlight advantages of collaborative grants among the institutions in the rich clubs.