A Study On The Effectiveness Of Scientific Funding Based On Mediating Effect Of Scientific Collaboration

Basic research is the foundation and driving force for the development of science and technology.As a major channel for government's supporting basic research,the Science Foundations have played a vital role in the development of basic research.In view of limited resources,the effectiveness of funding has been widely concerned by stakeholders,which has spawned many evaluation methods and practices.Most evaluations focus on number of direct scientific outputs,which was insufficient to fully reflect the raising effect of scientific funding on research abilities.According to Scientific and Technological Human Capital(STHC),scientific collaboration reflects the researchers' ability to access social network resources,and the ability to integrate and exploit tacit knowledge.In studying the impact of scientific funding on scientific collaboration,few studies relate the changes of scientific collaboration to increased research ability.Thus,this study will explore the effect of scientific funding from the perspective of scientific collaboration,aiming to deepen the understanding of roles of scientific funding,optimize the funding evaluation system,and provide reference for the decision making of projects and talents evaluation.Researchers funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)and the United States National Science Foundation(NSF)as well as their projects and publications are targeted.The impact of scientific funding on scientific collaboration,the relationship between scientific collaboration and research performance,and whether scientific collaboration plays a mediating role in the relationship between scientific funding and research performance are explored using bibliometric methods and statistical analysis.Scientific collaboration is investigated from the perspectives of team size and degree of international collaboration.The results show that scientific funding helps expand researchers' collaboration scope and enrich the resources for collaboration.With the implementation of funded projects,the degree of international collaboration of US researchers has generally increased,while that of Chinese researchers has not changed significantly.Larger teams and international collaborative teams have a higher impact.The publication productivity of researchers in selected fields has increased with the team size in earlier periods,but citation impact has not changed significantly.The degree of international collaboration has nothing to do with research productivity and citation impact or is negatively related.Scientific funding has led to an increase in average team size and/or degree of international collaboration,thereby improving research performance,indicating that scientific funding has an indirect impact on research performance through scientific collaboration,or that scientific collaboration plays as an intermediate factor between scientific funding and research performance.The study proposes following suggestions on how to improve funding effectiveness and the scientificity and comprehensiveness of funding evaluations.First,encourage and support highquality and efficient scientific collaboration,and create research projects for collaboration and exchange.Second,improve evaluation methodology for projects and talents by taking a research's academic stage and earlier research performance into consideration.Third,promote the growth of young researchers by increasing funding,setting up special collaborative projects,and optimizing evaluative mechanisms.The main innovations of the research are as follows: first,propose and investigate the indirect effect of scientific funding on research performance through scientific collaboration;second,enrich potential evaluation dimensions of funding effectiveness,and thus improve the evaluation efficiency and credibility;third,fill the gap in studying the relationship between scientific funding,scientific collaboration,and research performance.