In August 2008, Clarivate began to record funding acknowledgements from the papers it indexes for its Web of Science database. In addition to the name of the organization listed as a source of support, grant numbers are also captured (if given), as well as the acknowledgement paratext that provides further details of financial and other types of assistance.

The presence of funding acknowledgements in the database allows research inputs (financial support) to be linked, at the paper level, with research outputs (publications) and their impacts (measured by citation counts). The analysis of such linkages is complicated for several reasons: papers may and often do mention multiple funders, and different papers may acknowledge the same grant from the same funder. Also, authors who receive a grant may neglect to acknowledge this funding source in their papers. Despite these complexities, various analyses are now possible that could not be attempted previously, since one-by-one, manual look-ups were typically needed to obtain the input-output data at the paper level.

An example of what could not be produced in a practical way formerly appears above. A search of the Web of Science for research papers on autism identified 7,984 journal articles indexed since August 2008. The table above lists the top 20 funders acknowledged on those papers. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is clearly the world leader in funding autism research. (Some of the acknowledgements captured fail to mention a specific NIH institute.) Other major governmental support comes from the U.K. Medical Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the European Union. Strongly present, as well, are a number of charitable organizations: the U.K. Wellcome Trust, the Simons Foundation, as well as the disease-specific organization Autism Speaks. It should be noted that the National Alliance for Autism Research and the Cure Autism Now Foundation were merged with Autism Speaks in 2006 and 2007, respectively.

A comprehensive analysis of the impact for each funding agency, in terms of citations to the papers they supported, is probably premature since there has not been sufficient time for these publications to attract enough citations to assure a credible result, especially for those papers published in the last year. However, in a year or two more, such a study will be possible. Of course, papers should be evaluated by the fields they represent, since different fields exhibit different citation averages.

The “first fruits” of funding acknowledgement analysis are beginning to appear in the literature. Recently, Jue Wang and Philip Shapira have undertaken analyses of the funding of nanotechnology research through a survey of some 61,300 papers in this field, August 2008 through July 2009: Philip Shapira and Jue Wang, “Follow the money: What was the impact of the nanotechnology funding boom of the past ten years?” Nature, 468: 627-628, 2 December 2010, and Jue Wang and Philip Shapira, “Funding acknowledgement analysis: an enhanced tool to investigate research sponsorship impacts: the case of nanotechnology,” forthcoming in Scientometrics. Also, a working paper on the possibilities and challenges for such analyses has recently appeared: John Rigby, Systematic grant and funding body acknowledgement data for publications: An examination of new dimensions and new controversies for bibliometrics. Manchester Business School, Working Paper, No. 611. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester.

Click here to view more information on funding acknowledgement data in the Web of Science.