Incentivizing Academic Research

More and more, academia is moving to an incentives model. Researchers are increasingly asked to apply for grants to fund their research. Project proposals that are judged to be “excellent”, “novel”, and so on are given lucrative sums, while the other project proposals get nothing at all. The theory of the incentives model, even if it is often unstated, is that these big prizes will encourage better academic research overall, as researchers compete for them.

Does the incentives model work? No.

There are two main reasons. First, even when a project’s merit is measurable, it can be difficult to accurately discern its merit ahead of time. Second, small money toward many projects can spur more research overall than big money toward few projects.

In fact, Daniel Lakens already wrote an excellent blog post about this in 2013, but since the system is not slowing down, I thought I’d gather the available evidence in one place so I can easily refer back to it.

Danielle L. Herbert, Adrian G. Barnett, and Nicholas Graves (2013), “Funding: Australia’s grant system wastes time”, Nature 495.

We found that scientists in Australia spent more than five centuries’ worth of time preparing research-grant proposals for consideration by the largest funding scheme of 2012. Because just 20.5% of these applications were successful, the equivalent of some four centuries of effort returned no immediate benefit to researchers and wasted valuable research time. The system needs reforming and alternative funding processes should be investigated.

Jean-Michel Fortin and David J. Currie (2013). “Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding”, PLoS One.

Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be more productive.

Quirin Schiermeier & Richard Van Noorden (2015), “Germany claims success for elite universities drive”, Nature 525.

But the Excellence Initiative may not be separating the elites from the rest when it comes to the quality of research papers. Nature’s analysis shows that almost one-quarter of articles from Germany’s elites are now in the world’s top 10% by citations — up from one-sixth 12 years ago. Yet it also shows that some other German universities that received much less funding, or no top-up funds, have matched this rise.

Feel free to send me other empirical research that is pertinent!