A Study On Tne Quantitative Measures And Collaboration Networks Of Funded Papers

In the scientific system, science funding can be considered as one of the most important public resources.By giving financial supports for academic institutions, researchers and research projects, science funding provides the key support for the overall scientific innovation and the key topics.Therefore, the outputs, impact and collaboration patterns supported by science funding are the issues that academia generally concerns. Interpreting the elements of scientific system by objective and quantitative paradigms has always been persistent goal in scientometrics. However, for a long time, the quantitative researches on funded outputs had developed slowly. It is mainly due to the lack of unified, standardized and large-scale data sources which can be verified repeatedly. Until recently, the Web of Science (WoS) and other common database of bibliometrics has gradually begun to label the funding information of research papers, which makes the repeatable bibliometrics study and measurement of science funding based on a large sample become possible.This study mainly uses the large sample data in WoS, and takes scientometrics, informetrics, and network analysis as the core paradigms and methods. From the macro or meso perspective of country/territory, academic institution and discipline, this study systematically explores the production, impact and collaboration structures of funded innovation achievements in basic science. The main conclusions are:At the country/territory level, the funding ratio of natural science has exceeded 60%, and the funding outputs have become a major part of the innovation outputs in basic science. Whether in natural science or social science, science funding effectively improves the impact of academic achievements. In the main countries/territories, the funding ratio of China ranks first in both natural science and social science. However, on the whole, the funding ratio of each country/territory in social science is much lower than in natural science, which should be strengthened. At the institution level, the case of physics empirically shows that science funding can significantly enhance the impact indicators (citation index) of institutions. In particular, science funding plays a crucial role in the most influential outputs production of the institutions. In the discipline level, the case of economics empirically shows that there is an approximate power-law relationship among citations of funded papers, the number of funded papers and h-index of funded papers. As a mainstream discipline in social science, the funding ratio of economics is lower than the overall funding ratio of social science. Funding can not only improve the citation of papers, but also increase the usages of papers. However, the data in this study has not confirmed the correlation between the most cited papers and funding. In collaboration structure, the funded structures of collaborations among countries/territories are different:The developed countries like USA reflect both breadth and strength in collaborations, while the emerging powers like China have higher total collaboration strength, but limited breadth, and significantly depend on developed countries in collaborations. Whether the data of physics or result of economics shows that in recent years, except the active sub-group of European and US, there is a rise of East Asian subgroup in the pattern of collaboration. The results of this study have not confirmed that science funding can expand the collaboration scope and breadth of academic institutions, but show that science funding can enhance the collaboration strength between academic institutions and their backbone partners.This study introduces and applies the theory and method of informetrics into the macro and meso funding analysis, and explores the realistic role of funding for various science entities. It can provide a reference for future funding research and practice formulation of government and related departments of academia. The quantitative research on science funding is expected to become one of the up-and-coming areas of scientometrics and informetrics.