The important thing is not to win, it is to take part: What if scientists benefit from participating in research grant competitions?

Charles Ayoubi, Michele Pezzoni and Fabiana Visentin

Research Policy, 2019, vol. 48, issue 1, 84-97

Abstract: “The important thing is not to win, it is to take part,” this famous saying by Pierre de Coubertin asserts that the value athletes draw from Olympic games lies in their participation in the event and not in the gold they collect during it. We find similar evidence for scientists involved in grant competitions. Relying on unique data from a Swiss funding program, we find that scientists taking part in a research grant competition boost their number of publications and average impact factor while extending their knowledge base and their collaboration network regardless of the result of the competition. Receiving the funds increases the probability of co-authoring with co-applicants but has no additional impact on the individual productivity.

Keywords: Competitive grants; Public funding evaluation; Scientific productivity; Scientific collaboration; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733318301860
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The important thing is not to win, it is to take part: What if scientists benefit from participating in research grant competitions? (2019)
Working Paper: The important thing is not to win, it is to take part: What if scientists benefit from participating in research grant competitions? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:48:y:2019:i:1:p:84-97

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2018.07.021

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().