How competition for funding impacts scientific practice

Abstract

In the research integrity literature, funding enters in two different ways: as elevating questionable research practices due to perverse incentives, and as being a potential player to incentivize researchers to behave well. Other recent studies have emphasized the importance of the latter, asking funding experts. Here, I explored how the impact of competitive research funding on science is being perceived by active researchers. More specifically, I have conducted a series of group sessions with researchers in two different countries with a different degree of competition for funding, in three disciplinary fields (medical sciences, natural sciences and the humanities), and with researchers in two different career stages (permanent versus temporary employment). Researchers across all groups experienced that competition for funding shapes science, with many unintended questionable side effects. Intriguingly, these questionable effects had little to do with the type of questionable research practices (QRPs) typically being presented in the research integrity literature. While the notion of QRPs focuses on publications and assumes that there would essentially be a correct way to do the science, researchers worried about the shaping of science via funding. According to my session participants, rather than ending up as really being wrong, this shaping could result in predictable, fashionable, short-sighted, and overpromising science. And still, this was seen as highly problematic: scientists experienced that the projectification of science makes it more and more difficult to do any science of real importance: plunging into the unknown or addressing big issues that would need a long-term horizon to mature.