The enduring pursuit of public science at U.S. land-grant universities
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Barham B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8608486 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Federal funding for basic scientific research is the cornerstone of societal progress, economy, health and well-being. There is a direct relationship between financial investment in science and a nation's scientific discoveries, making it a priority for governments to distribute public funding appropriately in support of the best science. However, research grant proposal success rate and funding level can be skewed toward certain groups of applicants, and such skew may be driven by systemic bias arising during grant proposal evaluation and scoring. Policies to best redress this problem are not well established. Here, we show that funding success and grant amounts for applications to Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant program (2011-2014) are consistently lower for applicants from small institutions. This pattern persists across applicant experience levels, is consistent among three criteria used to score grant proposals, and therefore is interpreted as representing systemic bias targeting applicants from small institutions. When current funding success rates are projected forward, forecasts reveal that future science funding at small schools in Canada will decline precipitously in the next decade, if skews are left uncorrected. We show that a recently-adopted pilot program to bolster success by lowering standards for select applicants from small institutions will not erase funding skew, nor will several other post-evaluation corrective measures. Rather, to support objective and robust review of grant applications, it is necessary for research councils to address evaluation skew directly, by adopting procedures such as blind review of research proposals and bibliometric assessment of performance. Such measures will be important in restoring confidence in the objectivity and fairness of science funding decisions. Likewise, small institutions can improve their research success by more strongly supporting productive researchers and developing competitive graduate programming opportunities.
| S-EPMC4892638 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays a critical role in funding scientific endeavors in biomedicine. Funding innovative science is an essential element of the NIH's mission, but many have questioned the NIH's ability to fulfill this aim. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive corpus of published biomedical research articles, we measure whether the NIH succeeds in funding work with novel ideas, which we term edge science. We find that edge science is more often NIH funded than less novel science, but with a delay. Papers that build on very recent ideas are NIH funded less often than are papers that build on ideas that have had a chance to mature for at least 7 y. We have three further findings. First, the tendency to fund edge science is mostly limited to basic science. Papers that build on novel clinical ideas are not more often NIH funded than are papers that build on well-established clinical knowledge. Second, novel papers tend to be NIH funded more often because there are more NIH-funded papers in innovative areas of investigation, rather than because the NIH funds innovative papers within research areas. Third, the NIH's tendency to have funded papers that build on the most recent advances has declined over time. In this regard, NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects. Given our focus on published papers, the results reflect both the funding preferences of the NIH and the composition of the applications it receives.
| S-EPMC7275727 | biostudies-literature
Project description:There has been great growth in women's participation in the US academic doctoral workforce, but underrepresentation remains in all science and engineering fields, especially at high academic ranks. We obtained estimates of the numbers of professorial women and men in fields likely to seek funding from the National Science Foundation and aligned those numbers with each of six research directorates to investigate temporal trends in submission patterns. We found that women are as likely to be funded as men, but the percentage of women submitting proposals was less than expected in every field but engineering. Women are as likely as men to be employed at the most research active institutions, but women are less likely than men to self-report research as their primary work activity in almost all fields but engineering. This work imbalance ultimately limits the diversity of basic science research ideas in science and engineering.
| S-EPMC7498325 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In this data article, a thorough dataset on patterns of electricity use in Nigerian public universities was presented. Three relatively old public universities with staff and students' halls of residences were purposively selected. The selected universities were Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (OAU), Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), and University of Ibadan (UI). Data were obtained through the administration of a structured questionnaire on electricity end users in the universities sampled. For the data collection, the electricity end users in public universities were stratified into users in university staff offices, staff residences, student residences, and commercial units. Electricity users were selected using systematic random sampling and accidental sampling techniques. In OAU, FUTA and UI, 217, 137 and 164 students, respectively were sampled; 30, 3, and 61 households in OAU, FUTA, and UI, respectively were sampled while 28, 6, and 18 commercial units in OAU, FUTA and UI, respectively were also sampled. The sample size determined for staff in OAU, FUTA and UI were 139, 81 and 182, respectively. The data obtained were analyzed using radar charts. The information provided in this data article will encourage investigation into electricity management strategies, critical success factors for electricity management, planning, and policy formulation towards the realization of sustainable campuses.
| S-EPMC6176851 | biostudies-other
Project description:This study aimed to evaluate the impact of institutional research promoting policies and organizational characteristics on research productivity in Vietnam universities. The authors employed a dataset surveying faculty staff from 115 universities across the country and used multivariate data analysis to analyse data and test hypotheses. It was found that institutional characteristics such as size, time in operation and advantageous location were positively associated with research productivity. Specifically, universities located in the big cities with longer time in operation and larger size had higher level of international publication. Institutional policies such as management and infrastructure had a positive impact on research productivity while human resource policies had a positive impact on faculty research outcomes. The study also provided some suggestions to promote research productivity of Vietnam universities.
| S-EPMC7820924 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) guidance for specific institutional audiences to limit community spread. Audiences include: business, clinical, public health, education, community, and state/local government. The swift, severe, and global nature of COVID-19 offers an opportunity to systematically obtain a national view of how larger institutions of higher education adopted NPI guidance at the onset of the pandemic.MethodAn original database of COVID-19-related university NPI policy changes was compiled. Survey team members manually combed university websites and official statements capturing implementation decisions and dates for five NPI variables from 575 U.S. universities, across 50 states and the District of Columbia, during March of 2020. The universities included in this study were selected from the Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which provides a set of university explanatory variables. Using IPEDS as the basis for the organizational data allows consistent mapping to event-time and institutional characteristic variables including public health announcements, geospatial, census, and political affiliation.ResultsThe dataset enables event-time analysis and offers a variety of variables to support institutional level study and identification of underlying biases like educational attainment. A descriptive analysis of the dataset reveals that there was substantial heterogeneity in the decisions that were made and the timing of these decisions as they temporally related to key state, national, and global emergency announcements. The WHO pandemic declaration coincided with the largest number of university decisions to implement NPIs.ConclusionThis study provides descriptive observations and produced an original dataset that will be useful for future research focused on drivers and trends of COVID-19 NPIs for U.S. Universities. This preliminary analysis suggests COVID-19 university decisions appeared to be made largely at the university level, leading to major variations in the nature and timing of the responses both between and within states, which requires further study.
| S-EPMC7567344 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Objective:Several publication databases now index the associated funding agency and grant number metadata with their publication records. Librarians who are familiar with the particulars of these databases can assist investigators and administrators with data gathering for publication summaries and metrics required for renewals of and progress reports for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. Methods:Publication lists were pulled from three main indexers of publication-associated funding information (NIH RePORTER, PubMed, and Web of Science), using iterative search strategies. All discovered variations for the cited grant number of interest were recorded and tested. Publication lists were compared for overall coverage. Results:A total of 986 publications citing the single grant number of interest were returned from the given time frame: 920 were found in PubMed, 860 in NIH RePORTER, and 787 in Web of Science. Web of Science offered the highest percentage of publications that were not found in the other 2 sources (n=63). Analysis of publication funding acknowledgments uncovered 21 variations of the specific NIH award of interest that were used to report funding support. Conclusions:This study shows that while PubMed returns the most robust list of publications, variations in the format of reported funding support and indexing practices meant no one resource was sufficient to capture all publications that cited a given NIH project grant number. Librarians looking to help build grant-specific publication lists will need to use multiple resources and be aware of the most frequently reported grant variations to identify a comprehensive list of supported publications.
| S-EPMC6466482 | biostudies-other
Project description:IntroductionPrevious studies have examined the impact of Clinical and Translational Science Awards programs on other outcomes, but not on grant seeking. The authors examined the effects on grant seeking of the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR), a Clinical and Translational Science Awards institute at the University of Michigan.MethodsWe assessed over 63,000 grant proposals submitted at the University of Michigan in the years 2002-2012 using data from the university and MICHR's Tracking Metrics and Reporting System. We used a retrospective, observational study of the dynamics of grant-seeking success and award funding. Heckman selection models were run to assess MICHR's relationship with a proposal's success (selection), and subsequently the award's size (outcome). Models were run for all proposals and for clinical and translational research (CTR) proposals alone. Other covariates included proposal classification, type of grant award, academic unit, and year.ResultsMICHR had a positive and statistically significant relationship with success for both proposal types. For all grants, MICHR was associated with a 29.6% increase in award size. For CTR grants, MICHR had a statistically nonsignificant relationship with award size.ConclusionsMICHR's infrastructure, created to enable and enhance CTR, has also created positive spillovers for a broader spectrum of research and grant seeking.
| S-EPMC5444804 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Land use science has traditionally used case-study approaches for in-depth investigation of land use change processes and impacts. Meta-studies synthesize findings across case-study evidence to identify general patterns. In this paper, we provide a review of meta-studies in land use science. Various meta-studies have been conducted, which synthesize deforestation and agricultural land use change processes, while other important changes, such as urbanization, wetland conversion, and grassland dynamics have hardly been addressed. Meta-studies of land use change impacts focus mostly on biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles, while meta-studies of socioeconomic consequences are rare. Land use change processes and land use change impacts are generally addressed in isolation, while only few studies considered trajectories of drivers through changes to their impacts and their potential feedbacks. We provide a conceptual framework for linking meta-studies of land use change processes and impacts for the analysis of coupled human-environmental systems. Moreover, we provide suggestions for combining meta-studies of different land use change processes to develop a more integrated theory of land use change, and for combining meta-studies of land use change impacts to identify tradeoffs between different impacts. Land use science can benefit from an improved conceptualization of land use change processes and their impacts, and from new methods that combine meta-study findings to advance our understanding of human-environmental systems.
| S-EPMC4709351 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Global and regional economic and environmental changes are increasingly influencing local land-use, livelihoods, and ecosystems. At the same time, cumulative local land changes are driving global and regional changes in biodiversity and the environment. To understand the causes and consequences of these changes, land change science (LCS) draws on a wide array synthetic and meta-study techniques to generate global and regional knowledge from local case studies of land change. Here, we review the characteristics and applications of synthesis methods in LCS and assess the current state of synthetic research based on a meta-analysis of synthesis studies from 1995 to 2012. Publication of synthesis research is accelerating, with a clear trend toward increasingly sophisticated and quantitative methods, including meta-analysis. Detailed trends in synthesis objectives, methods, and land change phenomena and world regions most commonly studied are presented. Significant challenges to successful synthesis research in LCS are also identified, including issues of interpretability and comparability across case-studies and the limits of and biases in the geographic coverage of case studies. Nevertheless, synthesis methods based on local case studies will remain essential for generating systematic global and regional understanding of local land change for the foreseeable future, and multiple opportunities exist to accelerate and enhance the reliability of synthetic LCS research in the future. Demand for global and regional knowledge generation will continue to grow to support adaptation and mitigation policies consistent with both the local realities and regional and global environmental and economic contexts of land change.
| S-EPMC4372122 | biostudies-literature