On Decreasing Returns to Scale in Research Funding

In most countries, basic research is supported through governmental research councils that select, after peer review, the individuals or teams what will receive funding. Unfortunately, the number of grants these research councils can allocate is not infinite, and many researchers (45% in Quebec) are not able to obtain any funding. A small minority of those who do get funded account for the majority of the available funds. However, it is unknown whether or not this is an optimal way of distributing available funds. The purpose of this study is to measure the relation between the amount of funds given to 14,103 individual Quebec’s researchers over a fifteen year period (1998-2012) and the total outcome of their research in terms of output and impact from 2000 to 2012. Our results show that both in terms of the quantity of papers produced and of their scientific impact, the concentration of research funding in the hands of a so-called ‘elite’ of researchers generally produces diminishing returns. Conference Topic Science policy and research assessment