• Federal research funding has positive 'r

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Fri Apr 22 22:30:48 2022
    Federal research funding has positive 'ripple effects'

    Date:
    April 22, 2022
    Source:
    Ohio State University
    Summary:
    Federal funding for biomedical research has a 'ripple effect'
    of stimulating new studies even beyond the original purposes of
    a grant and may provide unexpected benefits, a new study suggests.



    FULL STORY ========================================================================== Federal funding for biomedical research has a "ripple effect" of
    stimulating new studies even beyond the original purposes of a grant
    and may provide unexpected benefits, a new study suggests.


    ========================================================================== Researchers used a unique dataset to get a never-before-seen view of
    how science funding is spent and the results it produces.

    The findings, published today (April 22, 2022) in the journal Science
    Advances, showed that funding of research by the National Institutes
    of Health mostly goes to hiring people who work on the projects funded
    by grants.

    But these people -- which includes staff and trainees like graduate
    students - - go on to do more than just work on the grants for which they
    were hired, said Enrico Berkes, co-author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in economics at The Ohio State University.

    "We see a great increase in productivity in publications directly linked
    to a grant but also in new studies that go beyond it," Berkes said. "There
    is this ripple effect where people supported by the grant also produce
    other quality work." And the biomedical researchers who are the focus
    of this study produced more clinical research as the result of receiving
    more funding -- studies directly related to patient care and health,
    said study co-author Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics at Ohio State.



    ========================================================================== "Funding is actually producing the kind of research that would lead to improvements in clinical outcomes for patients," Weinberg said.

    The key to this study is the UMETRICS dataset available through the
    Institute for Research on Innovation and Science. It provides detailed information concerning payments on sponsored research projects at 72 universities.

    This allowed the researchers to use payments to identify all people
    working on research projects funded by NIH -- from faculty members to
    trainees to staff.

    Berkes, Weinberg and colleagues then used the PubMed database to find
    all research publications produced by the scientists in the UMETRICS
    database. They examined NIH grants between 1985 and 2020.

    "We were able to link people to research projects by following the
    money," Weinberg said. "This allowed us to answer a question that
    wasn't possible before -- how money spent on research impacts people."
    Results showed that 68% of grant funding went to spending on employees,
    which included faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, research staff and other staff.



    ========================================================================== Increases in funding led labs to become more professionalized by hiring
    more staff and career researchers, findings showed. In fact, research
    and other staff showed a higher percentage of growth in employment than
    faculty members when funding increased.

    As funding increased and research teams got larger, they produced more scientific papers -- and the quality of research did not decline.

    "One hypothesis would be that as teams grow larger, they would become
    more bureaucratic, and it would become more difficult to produce quality science.

    But we found that labs kept productivity up, likely because they become
    more professionalized," Berkes said.

    Findings showed that the largest increase in papers comes from studies
    not directly related to the grant. These are often papers that are
    not co-authored by the principal investigator, the researcher who is responsible for getting and managing the funding.

    One way to understand the ripple effects of funding for medical research
    is to see how many research papers the people involved with the grants
    produce.

    Unsurprisingly, faculty members have the largest increase in new
    scientific papers as the result of additional funding. But in relative
    terms, the trainees -- including graduate students and postdoctoral
    researchers -- have a larger- percentage increase in papers they produce.

    "We can see how research funding is jump-starting the careers of trainees
    who take what they learn while working on these funded projects, and
    the collaborators they met on the grant, and start investigating other important issues," Weinberg said.

    Funding for biomedical research tends to increase both the number of
    clinical papers directly tied to patient care, and other types of medical research, results showed.

    These findings may provide the best view yet of how federal grants
    awarded for research are spent, Berkes said.

    "Funders tend to focus, understandably, on the impact of their money on
    the specific issue they funded," Berkes said.

    "But they should be aware of how their funding moves through a wide
    range of people and produces benefits they may have not expected."
    Funding for the study came from the National Institute on Aging,
    the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, the National
    Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Ewing
    Marion Kauffman and Alfred P. Sloan foundations.

    Other authors on the study were Reza Sattari, a former postdoctoral
    researcher, and Jung Bae, a PhD graduate, both from Ohio State.


    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
    written by Jeff Grabmeier. Note: Content may be edited for style and
    length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Reza Sattari, Jung Bae, Enrico Berkes, Bruce A. Weinberg. The ripple
    effects of funding on researchers and output. Science Advances,
    2022; 8 (16) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb7348 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220422161538.htm

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