When Excellence Stops Producing Knowledge: A Practitioner's Observation on Research Funding

TL;DR

This paper critically examines how current research funding systems, especially in competitive basic research and EU projects, have become decoupled from actual knowledge production due to evaluation practices and systemic trends.

Contribution

It provides an insider perspective on systemic issues in research funding, highlighting how evaluation criteria and trends undermine genuine knowledge creation.

Findings

Excellence is increasingly linked to representability rather than knowledge.

Proposal professionalization and AI tools are changing the funding landscape.

Evaluator shortages lead to reliance on distant reviewers, affecting research quality.

Abstract

After almost four decades of participating in competitive research funding -- as applicant, coordinator, evaluator, and panel member -- I have come to see a structural paradox: many participants recognize that the current system is approaching its functional limits, yet most reform measures intensify rather than alleviate the underlying dynamics. This paper documents how excellence has become decoupled from knowledge production through an increasing coupling to representability under evaluation. The discussion focuses on two domains in which this is particularly visible: competitive basic research funding and large EU consortium projects. Three accelerating trends are examined: the professionalization of proposal writing through specialized consultants, the rise of AI-assisted applications, and an evaluator shortage that forces panels to rely on reviewers increasingly distant from the actual research domains. These observations are offered not as external critique but as an insider account, in the hope that naming a widely experienced but rarely articulated pattern may enable more constructive orientation. Keywords: Research funding, Excellence, Evaluation, Goodhart's Law, Professionalization, AI-assisted proposals, Peer review crisis