An analysis of the funding effect of the National Social Science Fund&nbsp;in the field of public administration

CHEN Li-Jun; LI Yan

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Science Research Management ›› 2023, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (2) : 73-80.

An analysis of the funding effect of the National Social Science Fund in the field of public administration

Chen Lijun, Li Yan

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Abstract

It is undeniable that the development of science and technology and the improvement of scientific research performance are primarily attributed to the support of national scientific research investment and the science foundation system. How to judge scientific research funds′ efficiency and whether scientific research projects achieve the expected goals has become a common concern of practical and academic researchers. The existing researches focus on the funding effect of natural science from two categories. One is to construct the performance evaluation indicators for science foundation projects and further evaluate input-output effectiveness at the macro level. The other is to evaluate the fund provision′s function to a specific project at the individual level through bibliometric analysis and quasi-experimental research. However, most of these researches pay little attention to evaluating the funding effect in humanities and social sciences, nor does it distinguish the different effects of funding and the endowments of researchers on scientific research performance.This study takes 316 samples from public administration research projects. We study the data collected from 2006 to 2015 through the Propensity Score Stratification and Regression Analysis to explore the National Social Science Fund′s effect, trying to classify the function of the researcher′s endowments to his/her performance in researches.The results indicate that the National Social Science Fund can improve scientific research achievements, and for researchers with different scientific endowments, its effects are different. Specifically, this paper′s significant findings are summarized as follows: (1) Compared with the non-funded researchers, the National Social Science Fund can effectively improve the performance of Chinese articles. (2) Under the premise of similar scientific endowments, researchers who received the National Social Science Fund′s funding performed better, showing the National Social Science Fund will maximize the benefits to the good performers. (3) There is a significant difference among the research capability levels when obtained the funding support. The fund assistance plays stronger performance for the better capability researchers than less capable researchers. The higher productive researchers without funding support perform better than these low capability researchers with funding support, which indicated the scientific endowment is a key to researchers′ performance.The theoretical contribution of the study is to identify the effect of the National Social Science Fund on the research performance under the different scientific endowments of researchers. Regarding the practical implications, the National Social Science Fund shall prefer these researchers with higher research capability. The fund shall more use capability indicators in addition to the historical output of the researches in selection of project awards. The fund shall support these candidates with high research potential and high-quality performance, which can significantly improve the funding cost-effectiveness.However, this study still has the following limitations: (1) Data are mainly from Chinese journals, without including international academic journals, which may lead to underestimating the researchers′ outputs. (2) Researchers selected here may award multiple supports from different channels. It is a challenge to isolate the effect of a single channel to evaluate. Going forward, we shall integrate both local publishes and international publishes to study the effect of different channels of funding support, such as social science fund and natural science fund.

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National Social Science Fund / funding effect / propensity score stratification / public administration

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Chen Lijun, Li Yan. An analysis of the funding effect of the National Social Science Fund in the field of public administration[J]. Science Research Management. 2023, 44(2): 73-80

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