Do thematic funding instruments lead researchers in new directions? Strategic funding priorities and topic switching among British grant recipients

Research agencies increasingly use thematic funding schemes to steer scientists toward issues of political interest. Funders set strategic priorities and expect scientists to follow the money. Using statistical-matching methods, we paired 10,475 UK-based recipients of thematic grants (with aims proposed by the funding agency) and responsive-mode grants (with aims proposed by researchers) in Physics, Engineering, and Bioscience to investigate the relation between funding-type and shifts in scientists’ research interests. We applied citation-based community detection to create individual time-series of topic distributions based on the grantees’ publications, and used these to estimate funding-related shifts in research focus. Our analysis, which estimates the similarity of the grantees’ research focus before, during and after a grant, suggests that scientists acquiring thematic funding alter their research interests more than comparable scientists funded through responsive-mode schemes. However, recipients of both types of grants tend to revert toward their original research interests when the funding expires. We find no evidence that thematic funding increases the level of diversity in a recipient’s research portfolio. Our study thus highlights an ambiguous link between thematic funding mechanisms and researchers’ orientations.