An FWCI decomposition of Science Foundation Ireland funding

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the academic impact of Science Foundation Ireland funded research by decomposing citation metrics, revealing most funded publications surpass international interest levels and linking impact to socioeconomic relevance.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed FWCI decomposition for SFI Investigator Awards, accounting for distribution skewness and sample size, and explores the relationship between socioeconomic impact and academic interest.

Findings

SFI funded publications have a lognormal FWCI distribution with mean above 1.

Approximately 67% of awards exceed the median international academic interest.

A positive correlation exists between socioeconomic impact potential and academic interest.

Abstract

In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), now Research Ireland, pivoted to research with potential socioeconomic impact. Given that the latter can encompass higher technology readiness levels, which typically correlates with lower academic impact, it is interesting to understand how academic impact holds up in SFI funded research. Here we decompose SFI \textit{Investigator Awards} - arguably the most academic funding call - into $3,243$ constituent publications and field weighted citation impact (FWCI) values searchable in the SCOPUS database. Given that citation counts are skewed, we highlight the limitation of FWCI as a paper metric, which naively restricts one to comparisons of average FWCI ($\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}}$) in large samples. Neglecting publications with $\textrm{FWCI} < 0.1$ ($8.8\%$), SFI funded publications are well approximated by a lognormal distribution with $\mu = -0.0761^{+0.017}_{-0.0039}$ and $ \sigma = 0.933^{+0.011}_{-0.012}$ at $95 \%$ confidence level. This equates to an $\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}} = 1.433^{+0.029}_{-0.015}$ well above $\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}}=1$ internationally. Broken down by award, we correct $\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}}$ for small samples using simulations and find $\sim 67\%$ exceed \textit{median} international academic interest, thus exhibiting a positive correlation between the potential for socioeconomic impact and academic interest.