Is there a relationship between research sponsorship and publication impact? An analysis of funding acknowledgments in nanotechnology papers

Jue Wang; Philip Shapira

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117727

Is there a relationship between research sponsorship and publication impact? An analysis of funding acknowledgments in nanotechnology papers

PLoS One. 2015 Feb 19;10(2):e0117727. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117727. eCollection 2015.

Authors

Jue Wang¹, Philip Shapira²

Affiliations

¹ Public Policy and Global Affairs Program, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
² Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom; School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States of America.

Abstract

This study analyzes funding acknowledgments in scientific papers to investigate relationships between research sponsorship and publication impacts. We identify acknowledgments to research sponsors for nanotechnology papers published in the Web of Science during a one-year sample period. We examine the citations accrued by these papers and the journal impact factors of their publication titles. The results show that publications from grant sponsored research exhibit higher impacts in terms of both journal ranking and citation counts than research that is not grant sponsored. We discuss the method and models used, and the insights provided by this approach as well as it limitations.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Databases, Factual
Journal Impact Factor*
Nanotechnology
Publishing / economics*
Publishing / statistics & numerical data*
Research / economics*

Grants and funding

This research was supported in part by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) under National Science Foundation Grant No. 0531194. (http://www.nsf.gov) (PS JW). Additional support was provided by the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. (https://research.mbs.ac.uk/innovation/) (PS). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.