Understanding where ARRA research funds are going Understanding where ARRA research funds are going
Here at ResearchScorecard we love numbers, especially when it concerns understanding funding decisions and projected impact on future research and product usage. The first batch of ARRA awards has now been released and we’ve been analyzing where the dollars are going.
 Table 1
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We first looked at the distribution of funds to the six universities we cover currently (Table 1 and 2).
Although UCLA received the largest amount, on a dollar-per-principal investigator (PI) basis it ranks second, with a far smaller average-dollars-per-PI compared with the number one per-capita recipient, The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA ($355K vs. $270K per PI). |
Table 2
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To explain this sizeable difference, I postulate that grants to Scripps researchers tend to be more clinical in nature, since clinical research is notoriously more expensive than non-clinical research. I confess I haven’t dug deep enough to confirm this, though. |
Figure 1
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UCLA also comes in first with the largest number of grants awarded per recipient PI (Fig 1). This doesn’t mean a whole lot, though, as UCLA is substantially larger that ther other institutions in our database, and so you would expect them to score highest in this respect simply because they have more researchers. However, Caltech and Stanford are noteworthy for tying in second place for the number of awards, since both institutions are much smaller than the others.
I believe this reflects the outstanding average quality of the research performed at these institutions, as measured by scientific impact, grant funding per PI and other factors. |
Figure 2
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When ARRA awards are analyzed with respect to the primary research area of the recipients, researchers involved in immunology, computational biology and genetics scored best in securing ARRA funding (Fig 2). |
Table 3
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Table 3 lists the specific primary research topics of the PIs that make up the summary areas in Fig. 2, along with the matching funding, and oh by the way, this classification accounts for 68% of the funding, as we don’t have data on some of the recipients at this time (won’t last long, not to worry). |
Figure 3
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Another interesting analysis asks the question “does the funding go primarily to oustanding researchers?” The short answer is no. Correlating the distribution of awards with researcher ranking based on our GOPR metric, we find that recipients are broadly distributed, though there is a small cluster of recipients of multiple ARRA grants in the high percentile range (Fig. 3). Interestingly, the sole individual that received three grants doesn’t score very high. |
Table 4
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Finally, Table 4 looks at trademarked product usage for a dozen products that recipient researchers have mentioned in their papers since 2006.
I’m also including a comparison of usage between researchers whose GOPR was in the top 10% in 2008 (i.e., 90% percentile) and all recipients. Comparing with the 90% GOPR percentile, products that are significantly under-utilized are listed in green, whereas products that are significantly over-used are listed in orange. |