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The Forum > Article Comments > Funding scientific research: money can't buy love > Comments

Funding scientific research: money can't buy love : Comments

By Allen Greer, published 28/10/2014

How much science does Australia produce for the amount of money it spends; what is the quality of its science and what makes for high quality anyway?

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Hi Allen
Interesting article and good questions.

The measure of number of papers published is obviously inadequate as it takes no account of quality. It provides no justification of any government funding.

And the number of published papers cited is also rather dubious. They might have been cited on the basis of an erroneous theory; or to demonstrate an erroneous theory. At best the number of published papers cited would be only a highly contingent surrogate measure of the ultimate benefits that government claims to provide society by funding science.

Surely scientists can do better than that?

Perhaps you, or anyone, can answer the critical question on which all government funding of science depends.

By what rational criterion can we
a) know, and
b) calculate
whether government is spending too much, too little, or the right amount on science, in terms of the subjective evaluations of all the people paying for, and of all the intended consumers of the supposed benefits, considering all the other values that, from their point of view, were more urgent and important and which they might have preferred the money were spent on?

Usually all people do is point to benefits. But that is childish. Obviously if we take no account of the costs, anything will seem beneficial. The question is always net benefits, not benefits per se.

Also what account do you take of the coercive nature of government fund-raising? By forcibly overriding the values and wants of those paying for it, obviously we have established that they don't demand the service. And by providing the fruits free to those who have not paid, how do we know that their demand isn't excessive, and therefore the use of funds uneconomical, thus disproving the argument, or rather assumptions that government funding of science provides net benefits for society?
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 7:46:41 AM
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It would be interesting to know how much of this expenditure was committed to the previous governments promotion of the global warming fraud.

Obviously any funding for this fraud was to the detriment of the taxpayer who funded it.

When funding such as that of global warming is obviously to the public determent, by being used to increase control of & increase the cost of living for that public, it could be argued that government funding of research is not just detrimental but extremely negative for those who pay for it.

It is probably fair to say that as much as 20% of that funding is going to tired old tenured academics, who are merely going through the motions as they await retirement age. In these cases the money buys nothing at all.
Posted by Hasbeen, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 10:18:53 AM
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Figure 4 is Figure 1 again, sadly. It would have been really useful to see what the comparison between R&D spend and highly cited papers was.

For all its limitations, citations is probably the best and easiest metric of output to use. Science is built on other science and citations demonstrate that others are reading the work.

However, boiling this down to benefit to society becomes harder. As a society most of us recognise that we have to invest in science, but how much and in what areas? Australia is a substantial investor in agricultural R&D and this has clearly been to the benefit of Australia. No other country is going to develop new knowledge that is suitable to the Australian environment.

But what about so-called 'blue sky' research? How much should a small country like Australia invest? One economic argument would be that no investment is necessary as other countries like China and the US do it so much better than Australia and have so much more invested. However, I would suggest that such an argument is flawed unless Australia sees itself as a small back water digging minerals out of the ground to sell to the rest of the world.

Investment in science R&D is a key driver of innovation. We don't know where innovation will come from, so the sensible thing to do would be to invest a sufficient amount across many areas, so that Australia can capture some of the value of the innovation.

The concept of a policy change that encourages more international collaboration seems a good idea all round. However, that may require that Australia invest more per head than a country like Denmark - due to distances.
Posted by Agronomist, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 2:52:13 PM
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Interesting piece, but the analysis didn't really provide me with a better understanding of how to make better funding decisions regarding science. I'm not really sure how the author has defined "R&D". Is this total spending (public and private) on any "research", and any "development". What do these activities include/exclude?

Most of my most successful research has currently not been published anywhere, as out patents are under license from various companies. On the other hand, my most cited publication is a review article, which does not really require much funding to produce. Overall, I don't believe the "normalized impact" vs "R&D expenditure" is a valid comparison simply due to the timing of funding and citations. How do you decide if funding during a certain period influences the number of citations of a publication seeing that citations gradually increase over many years. A publication may only have 50 or so citations in 2013, but by 2050 may be the most widely cited paper. That said, I agree that simply spending more money does not immediately guarantee quality.

How about comparing funding to number of patents? What about comparing funding in medical research to number of clinical trials?
Posted by Stezza, Wednesday, 29 October 2014 12:34:13 AM
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An interesting analysis from Nature on the most-cited research of all time.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews

Apparently it takes around 12k citations to make the top 100. Discoveries including DNA’s double-helix structure and the expansion of the universe don't make the cut, while the most cited paper is from 1951 and describes an assay to determine the amount of protein in a solution.

Perhaps the number of citations is not the best measure of "impact"
Posted by Stezza, Thursday, 30 October 2014 7:46:53 AM
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