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Comparing the Impact of Supporting Grant Type on the Quality of Research Output

Mohammad A Khiyami , Layal A AlHareqy and Abdulwali Aldahmash

This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of the types of grants, large (LG) or small (SG), funded by King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST). Specifically, this research attempts to compare grants with regard to their scientific outputs as represented by the number of published articles, the number of reputable journals published within, and the number of citations achieved by the published papers. In addition, the study investigates the number of patents produced, the number of conferences and symposiums attended by the funded researchers, and the number of published abstracts in conference proceedings. Data collection was conducted via a questionnaire distributed to 600 KACST funded principle investigators whose research had been completed within the last five years. 311 recipients responded to the questionnaire corresponding to 311 funded projects. Overall results indicate that the funded projects 215 LGs and 96 SGs produced 421 published papers that were cited 1389 times. There were also 30 patents produced from these grants, 27 of which were from LGs and 3 from SGs. The results showed a greater number of published papers-292 and number of citations-1278 for the LGs as compared to 129 papers and 111 citations from SGs. However, the ratio of projects to published papers from LGs and SGs is nearly equivalent at a ratio of 1.358 and 1.344 respectively. Papers produced from SGs were published in journals with high impact factors at a rate of 0.51, which is greater than that of the large grants at 0.3562. This seems to point to the possibility that increasing the monetary size of grants’ does not lead to better outcomes in terms of numbers of publications, prestige of journals published in, or total number of citations. In sum, the analyses indicate that the measurement of grant impacts is sensitive to how research performance is defined and tested using bibliometric indicators. In addition, when compared by the amount of funding for a project used to produce each paper, it was found that SG are more productive than LG with the cost of a LG published paper equal to 7.5 times that of a SG published paper. It is recommended that future funds should be allocated according to more strict regulations and standards. We recommend that outputs resultant of the research funding should be thoroughly documented. Finally we also recommend further studies to determine appropriate research output metrics to evaluate projects. This is to aid monitoring future funding more efficiently and productivley.