Funding programmes for young scientists--Do the 'best' apply?

Jörg Neufeld and Stefan Hornbostel

Research Evaluation, 2012, vol. 21, issue 4, 270-279

Abstract: Evaluation studies of application-based funding programmes often raise the question of whether the 'best' applicants (in terms of ex-ante and ex-post publication performance) are selected for funding. For this reason actual applicants seem to be a well-studied group. However, for a comprehensive appraisal of the applicants' group, some details about performance distribution in the group of potential applicants would be valuable. The relative performance of actual applicants (compared to potential applicants) is of interest to funding organizations when developing, rearranging and promoting their funding schemes. The question is: 'Does a funding scheme attract the "best" young scientists?' Or are there alternative attractive ways of pursuing a scientific career that influence the choice of potential applicants? In this article we examine that question by using bibliometric methods to compare a sample of applicants for the Emmy Noether Programme (ENP) provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with potential applicants (people who actually hold a professorship or are qualified for it (Habilitierte), and who are from the same cohort of postdocs as the ENP applicants, but did not apply for the ENP. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2012
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