Is Research Funding Always Beneficial? A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of UK Research 2014-20

TL;DR

This study analyzes UK research from 2014-20 to assess whether external funding correlates with higher research quality across disciplines, revealing funding's overall positive impact but with notable differences among fields and funders.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive cross-disciplinary analysis of funding effects on research quality using REF 2021 peer review scores, highlighting variations across fields and funders.

Findings

Funded research generally has higher quality scores.

Disciplinary differences in funding proportions are substantial.

Funding benefits are especially notable in health-related fields.

Abstract

The search for and management of external funding now occupies much valuable researcher time. Whilst funding is essential for some types of research and beneficial for others, it may also constrain academic choice and creativity. Thus, it is important to assess whether it is ever detrimental or unnecessary. Here we investigate whether funded research tends to be higher quality in all fields and for all major research funders. Based on peer review quality scores for 113,877 articles from all fields in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, we estimate that there are substantial disciplinary differences in the proportion of funded journal articles, from Theology and Religious Studies (16%+) to Biological Sciences (91%+). The results suggest that funded research is likely to be higher quality overall, for all the largest research funders, and for all fields, even after factoring out research team size. There are differences between funders in the average quality of the research they support, however. Funding seems particularly beneficial in health-related fields. The results do not show cause and effect and do not take into account the amount of funding received but are consistent with funding either improving research quality or being won by high quality researchers or projects. In summary, there are no broad fields of research in which funding is irrelevant, so no fields can afford to ignore it. The results also show that citations are not effective proxies for research quality in the arts and humanities and most social sciences for evaluating research funding.