Project description:BackgroundThe legal framework and funding mechanisms of the national health research system were recently reformed in Mexico. A study of the resource allocation for health research is still missing. We identified the health research areas funded by the National Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT) and examined whether research funding has been aligned to national health problems.Methods and findingsWe collected the information to create a database of research grant projects supported through the three main Sectoral Funds managed by CONACYT between 2003 and 2010. The health-related projects were identified and classified according to their methodological approach and research objective. A correlation analysis was carried out to evaluate the association between disease-specific funding and two indicators of disease burden. From 2003 to 2010, research grant funding increased by 32% at a compound annual growth rate of 3.5%. By research objective, the budget fluctuated annually resulting in modest increments or even decrements during the period under analysis. The basic science category received the largest share of funding (29%) while the less funded category was violence and accidents (1.4%). The number of deaths (? = 0.51; P<0.001) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs; ? = 0.33; P = 0.004) were weakly correlated with the funding for health research. Considering the two indicators, poisonings and infectious and parasitic diseases were among the most overfunded conditions. In contrast, congenital anomalies, road traffic accidents, cerebrovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were the most underfunded conditions.ConclusionsAlthough the health research funding has grown since the creation of CONACYT sectoral funds, the financial effort is still low in comparison to other Latin American countries with similar development. Furthermore, the great diversity of the funded topics compromises the efficacy of the investment. Better mechanisms of research priority-setting are required to adjust the research portfolio to the new health panorama of Mexican population.
Project description:The IADR Global Oral Health Inequalities Task Group on Dental Caries has synthesized current evidence and opinion to identify a five-year implementation and research agenda which should lead to improvements in global oral health, with particular reference to the implementation of current best evidence as well as integrated action to reduce caries and health inequalities between and within countries. The Group determined that research should: integrate health and oral health wherever possible, using common risk factors; be able to respond to and influence international developments in health, healthcare, and health payment systems as well as dental prevention and materials; and exploit the potential for novel funding partnerships with industry and foundations. More effective communication between and among the basic science, clinical science, and health promotion/public health research communities is needed. Translation of research into policy and practice should be a priority for all. Both community and individual interventions need tailoring to achieve a more equal and person-centered preventive focus and reduce any social gradient in health. Recommendations are made for both clinical and public health implementation of existing research and for caries-related research agendas in clinical science, health promotion/public health, and basic science.
Project description:OBJECTIVES:To evaluate the influence of external peer reviewer scores on the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) research funding board decisions by the number of reviewers and type of reviewer expertise. DESIGN:Retrospective analysis of external peer review scores for shortlisted full applications for funding (280 funding applications, 1236 individual reviewers, 1561 review scores). SETTING:Four applied health research funding programmes of NIHR, UK. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:Board decision to fund or not fund research applications. RESULTS:The mean score of reviewers predicted funding decisions better than individual reviewer scores (area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve 0.75, 95% CI 0.69 to 0.81 compared with 0.62, CI 0.59 to 0.65). There was no substantial improvement in how accurately mean reviewer scores predicted funding decisions when the number of reviewers increased above 4 (area under ROC curve 0.75, CI 0.59 to 0.91 for four reviewers; 0.80, CI 0.67 to 0.92 for seven or more). Reviewers with differing expertise influenced the board's decision equally, including public and patient reviewers (area under ROC curves from 0.57, CI 0.47 to 0.66 for health economists to 0.64, CI 0.57 to 0.70 for subject-matter experts). The areas under the ROC curves were quite low when using reviewers' scores, confirming that boards do not rely solely on those scores alone to make their funding decisions, which are best predicted by the mean board score. CONCLUSIONS:Boards value scores that originate from a diverse pool of reviewers. On the basis of independent reviewer score alone, there is no detectable benefit of using more than four reviewer scores in terms of their influence on board decisions, so to improve efficiency, it may be possible to avoid using larger numbers of reviewers. The funding decision is best predicted by the board score.
Project description:Every year the National Institutes of Health allocates $10.7 billion (one-third of its funds) for clinical science research while the pharmaceutical companies spend $52.9 billion (90% of its annual budget). However, we know little about funder collaborations and the impact of collaboratively funded projects. As an initial effort towards this, we examine the co-funding network, where a funder represents a node and an edge signifies collaboration. Our core data include all papers that cite and receive citations by the Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews, a prominent clinical review journal. We find that 65% of clinical papers have multiple funders and discover communities of funders that are formed by national boundaries and funding objectives. To quantify success in funding, we use a g-index metric that indicates efficiency of funders in supporting clinically relevant research. After controlling for authorship, we find that funders generally achieve higher success when collaborating than when solo-funding. We also find that as a funder, seeking multiple, direct connections with various disconnected funders may be more beneficial than being part of a densely interconnected network of co-funders. The results of this paper indicate that collaborations can potentially accelerate innovation, not only among authors but also funders.
Project description:BackgroundGlobal investment in research on noncommunicable diseases is on the rise. Cancer as primus inter pares draws particular interest from a wide spectrum of research funders. Next to the private, governmental, and academic sectors, philanthropy has carved out a sizeable area in the funding landscape over the last 25 years. Previous reports describing cancer research funding have looked at the volume of investment in cancer research but have paid little attention to building strategic intelligence on funders. Moreover, these efforts have focused primarily on well-resourced organizations, neglecting a large number of players with less-developed finances.MethodsIn this article, we combined gnostic data acquisition with agnostic bibliometrics to establish a comprehensive map of the global cancer research funding landscape. The analysis of funding acknowledgments from cancer research papers used in this exercise is a "bottom-up" method that provides a broader perspective on the variety of actors involved. It does not rely on a priori knowledge, nor does it require funders' support for access to the data.ResultsUsing this approach, we have identified a total of 4693 organizations from 107 countries engaged in funding cancer research today.ConclusionsThis is the largest mapping exercise performed to date and should serve as a knowledge base for future analyses and comparisons aimed at understanding the dynamics and priorities of global cancer research funding.
Project description:Although the scientific peer review process is crucial to distributing research investments, little has been reported about the decision-making processes used by reviewers. One key attribute likely to be important for decision-making is reviewer expertise. Recent data from an experimental blinded review utilizing a direct measure of expertise has found that closer intellectual distances between applicant and reviewer lead to harsher evaluations, possibly suggesting that information is differentially sampled across subject-matter expertise levels and across information type (e.g. strengths or weaknesses). However, social and professional networks have been suggested to play a role in reviewer scoring. In an effort to test whether this result can be replicated in a real-world unblinded study utilizing self-assessed reviewer expertise, we conducted a retrospective multi-level regression analysis of 1,450 individual unblinded evaluations of 725 biomedical research funding applications by 1,044 reviewers. Despite the large variability in the scoring data, the results are largely confirmatory of work from blinded reviews, by which a linear relationship between reviewer expertise and their evaluations was observed-reviewers with higher levels of self-assessed expertise tended to be harsher in their evaluations. However, we also found that reviewer and applicant seniority could influence this relationship, suggesting social networks could have subtle influences on reviewer scoring. Overall, these results highlight the need to explore how reviewers utilize their expertise to gather and weight information from the application in making their evaluations.
Project description:Based on the data of China's listed companies from 2000 to 2022, this study investigates how company misconduct affect company survival risk through survival analysis. The research results show that company misconduct significantly increases company survival risk. After considering endogeneity issues and conducting robustness tests, this conclusion still holds. Mechanism analysis reveals that company misconduct significantly increases enterprise survival risk by reducing investor confidence and increasing corporate financing constraints. Further analysis considering company and regional heterogeneity, which shows that non-state-owned, small-scale, low equity concentration, and eastern region company face more severe survival risk after misconduct. The findings extend the research on the influencing factor of company survival, and provide new empirical evidence for revealing how corporate misconduct affect company survival risk.
Project description:BackgroundThe prevailing health and biomedical sciences (HBMS) research agenda, not only determined by leading academic institutions but also by large pharmaceutical companies, has been shown to prioritize the exploration of novel pharmacological interventions over the study of the socio-environmental factors influencing illness onset and progression. The aim of this investigation is to quantitatively explore whether and to what extent the prevailing international HBMS research agenda and the key actors setting this agenda influence research in non-core countries.MethodsWe used the Web of Science database and the CorText platform to proxy the HBMS research agenda of a prestigious research institution from Latin America: Argentina's National Research Council (CONICET). We conducted a bibliometric and lexical analysis of 16,309 HBMS academic articles whereby CONICET was among the authors' affiliations. The content of CONICET's agenda was represented through co-occurrence network maps of the most frequent concatenation of terms found in titles, keywords, and abstracts. We compared our findings with previous reports on the international HBMS research agenda.ResultsIn line with the results previously reported for the prevailing international agenda, we found that terms linked to molecular biology and cancer research hegemonize CONICET's HBMS research agenda, whereas terms connecting HBMS research with socio-environmental cues are marginal. However, we also found differences with the international agenda: CONICET's HBMS agenda shows a marginal presence of terms linked to translational medicine, while terms associated with categories such as pathogens, plant research, agrobiotechnology, and food industry are more represented than in the prevailing agenda.ConclusionsCONICET's HBMS research agenda shares topics, priorities, and methodologies with the prevailing HBMS international research agenda. However, CONICET's HBMS research agenda is internally heterogeneous, appearing to be mostly driven by a combination of elements that not only reflect academic dependency (the adoption of the prevailing research agenda by non-core research institutions) but also local economic determinants associated with Argentina's place in the international division of labor as an exporter of primary goods.