Funding scientific research: money can't buy love

In this plot, Australia is respectably above the trendline, but it is surpassed by six countries: United States, Great Britain, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Iceland, all in the OECD. If policy makers are interested in increasing the impact of their country's research beyond what increased collaboration can achieve, then scrutiny of the policy settings in these countries, especially the smaller ones such as Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands and Switzerland would be informative. Like R&D money allocated (above), the percent of international collaboration among institutions is amenable to policy changes.

And just to note, the amount spent on R&D (years 2009 + 2010) was inversely correlated with the percent of international collaboration among institutions (years 2003-2011; R = -37.6, N = 40, P< 0.02). This suggests actual policies affecting collaboration are more important that the sheer size of the R&D budget.

Finally, how much of the crème de la crème of impact does collaboration gain a country? When countries' percent of the top one percent of cited papers (van Noorden, 2012 for data.) is compared to their degree of collaboration (above) using the 32 available countries including 27 from the OECD, the best-fit trendline is a power function (Fig. 4) that accounts for 69 percent of the variance (a linear function differs only in the third decimal place).

Fig. 4. The percent of a county's papers in 2012 among the top one percent of papers cited for 32 countries, including 27 of the 34 OECD countries (Chile, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Slovakia omitted). Australia is shown in red.

Australia is above the trendline, but ten other countries clearly exceed it: USA, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Israel, South Africa, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, all but one of which is in the OECD.

In policy terms, it looks as if collaboration helps the cream rise to the top.

In summary, in scientific research, money doesn't buy impact but collaboration does.