Abstract
Scientometric laws like those of Lotka, Bradford, and Zipf provide useful models for the behavior of indicators. Here additional laws are proposed that connect scientific publication counts to national funding of research and development (GERD). The laws are based on experimental evidence of what is clearly a causal relationship: funding is necessary, if not always sufficient, to conduct publishable research. The evidence comes from integer and fractional counts from Scopus and Web of Science. The explanatory variables come from a UNESCO data set that provided data from 93 countries; a subset of 43 industrialized nations from OECD, and another of 50 less industrialized nations. Models were built from cross sectional data plus panel data models combining longitudinal and cross-sectional data. GERD was shown to be an excellent explanatory variable. If a second explanatory variable is added to the model, the number of researchers adds some precision. Applications include forecasting publication counts from published funding plans, estimating the funding required for a nation to improve its publication performance, and using models for “what-if” experimentation.
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Notes
One apparent exception occurs when research efforts are funded from some other source, like a professor using support for education to do research.
The term "IV' usually means instrument variable in econometrics; here it is simply any explanatory variable that is considered to be independent.
The 2009 paper used 0.71 instead of 0.81 for Chinese ki, because of a change in the PPP weight for China about that time; this had little effect on the crossover, making it 1 year later.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly funded by NSF cooperative agreement ENG-0844639. These findings do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. Collaborators on some of the preliminary works include Aparna Basu, Patricia Foland, Geoff Holdridge, and Loet Leydesdorff. Extensive suggestions by anonymous reviewers were much appreciated.
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Shelton, R.D. Scientometric laws connecting publication counts to national research funding. Scientometrics 123, 181–206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03392-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03392-x