Short-term effects of non-competitive funding to single academic researchers

Research funding is essential to promote the scientific activity of researchers and the dissemination of their results. Simplifying, funding schemes can be classified in two categories—competitive and non-competitive—with several corresponding advantages and shortcomings, which are widely discussed in the scientific literature. The researchers of Politecnico di Torino (i.e., one of the major Italian technical universities) have recently been funded through a non-competitive research funding, consisting of 14k€ for every single researcher in each of the last three years (i.e., from 2017 to 2019), for a total of 42k€. This somewhat unusual initiative—also called “diffused funding” (DF)—represents an important opportunity to investigate the effects of the relatively large allocation of non-competitive funding to single researchers. In this regard, this paper investigates the effects of the DF on the researchers’ scientific output, according to four dimensions of analysis: publishing productivity, publishing diffusion/impact, journal reputation, and international research relations. Preliminary results do not indicate any improvement in the publication output, at least in the short term.