Collaboration and impact of research in different disciplines with international funding (from the EU and other foreign sources)

Abstract

The advancement of scientific research requires an adequate investment, which calls for promoting fair political decisions about the allocation of limited resources. In this context, funders need to be properly informed to assess the results of research lines or programmes. The WoS databases can help in making decisions, since they include the funding acknowledgements of documents along with additional useful data. The purpose of this paper is to analyse, in four different disciplines, the possible relation between international funding (from the EU and other foreign sources) and collaboration and impact. WoS articles with a Spanish address and written in English are selected (period 2010-2014), classifying them according to the existence or absence of funding acknowledgements, and identifying international sponsorship and the presence of EU funds. After applying some logistic regression models, the results confirm the hypotheses, except for some unexpected findings. In general, articles with international funding present greater collaboration, especially international and larger for those supported by only other non-EU foreign funds, with some differences between disciplines. This internationally funded research also achieves the highest citation rates, being unexpectedly higher for publications sponsored by EU funds, even showing less cooperation than those supported by other foreign funds. In the same way, the proportion of articles with only national funding is not diminished by their limited percentage of collaboration. In conclusion, this paper provides interesting information, both for funders and researchers, discussing the various characteristics and disparities between disciplines and funding sources.