Theoretical research without projects

Abstract

We propose a funding scheme for theoretical research that does not rely on project proposals, but on recent past scientific productivity. Given a quantitative figure of merit on the latter and the total research budget, we introduce a number of policies to decide the allocation of funds in each grant call. Under some assumptions on scientific productivity, some of such policies are shown to converge, in the limit of many grant calls, to a funding configuration that is close to the maximum total productivity of the whole scientific community. We present numerical simulations showing evidence that these schemes would also perform well in the presence of statistical noise in the scientific productivity and/or its evaluation. Finally, we prove that one of our policies cannot be cheated by individual research units. Our work must be understood as a first step towards a mathematical theory of the research activity.

arXiv commentSome edits to the published version

References in corpus (7)

• An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms
• The Scientific Competitiveness of Nations
• To Apply or Not to Apply: A Survey Analysis of Grant Writing Costs and Benefits
• Do they agree? Bibliometric evaluation vs informed peer review in the Italian research assessment exercise
• Systematic analysis of agreement between metrics and peer review in the UK REF
• Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Editor Behavior through Potentially Coercive Citations
• Bibliometric evaluation of research performance: where do we stand?