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Funding scientific research: money can't buy love

By Allen Greer - posted Tuesday, 28 October 2014


Australia often decries its placement among the OECD countries, especially as being the only one without a national science and technology strategy (Office of the Chief Scientist, 2014). On the metric of the amount of science produced per dollar spent, Australia exceeds all but five of the 29 OECD countries for which there are data. Is this a case for or against a national science strategy?

It's worth noting that some assessments of Australia's comparative R&D output use R&D as a percentage of GDP, instead of the absolute amount of money. However, this is a derivative variable and does not reveal, as absolute expenditure does, the specific dollar input spent to achieve a specific amount of science ouput. For example, the best-fit trendline for papers published in 2011 versus R&D as a percent of GDP for 2009 (N = 37) is a power function that explains only 10 percent of the variance.

Impact of the Science

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Quantity of science is one thing. Quality is another. Measures of quality, for better or worse, are usually based on the number of citations a country's papers receive. The Office of the Chief Scientist in Australia, for example, accepts that a measure of citation rate is a proxy for the quality of science (Pettigrew, 2012; Office of Chief Scientist media release, "Benchmarking Australian Science Performance," 22 February 2013; West, 2013). Here, the OECD's "normalized impact" is used (see OECD, 2013:60 data and definition). Parenthetically, the normalized impact (years 2003-2011; OECD, 2013 data) is highly correlated with the average number of citations per paper (years 2003-2013; SCImago data; R = 0.95, N = 40, P < 0.01, pers. obs).

Does the total amount of money spent on R&D money affect the "impact" of a country's science as well as its quantity?

When countries' impact factor is plotted against the amount spent on R&D (years 2009 + 2010), the best-fit trendline is a polynomial, which accounts for only three percent of the variance of the impact measure (Fig. 2). So the money spent on R&D doesn't seem to affect the quality of a country's science.

Fig. 2. The normalised impact ratio compared with R&D expenditure in 2009 + 2010 for 40 countries, including all 34 OECD countries. Australia is shown in red.

What other factors might affect the quality of a country's science? Recently, the OECD found an association between the percent of international collaboration among institutions (years 2003-2011; OECD, 2013: 60 for data and definition) and normalized impact (above). While it identified a "positive relationship between measures of scientific research collaboration and impact (OECD, 2013: 60)," it did not analyse the shape or goodness of fit of the relationship.

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When this analysis is done for 39 countries, including all but one OECD country (Greece), the best-fit trendline with collaboration as the dependent variable is a power function that accounts for 41 percent of the variance of impact (Fig. 3). In other words, the amount spent on R&D is not a good predictor (determinant?) of a country's research impact but the degree of collaboration is.

Fig. 3. The normalized impact ratio compared with the percentage of international institutional collaboration for 39 countries, including 33 of the 34 OECD countries (Greece omitted). Australia is shown in red.

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About the Author

Allen Greer is a biologist who writes about science and nature.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Allen Greer

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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