Invertir en excelencia no es la panacea: es mejor invertir en diversidad. Ahí queda eso.

 Bravo. Ya era hora de que alguien hiciese este trabajo. Ya está bien de "científicos de élite". ¿No les llega con los deportistas de élite para ver la cantidad de monstruos que genera la supercompetición?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0065263



Agencies that fund scientific research must choose: is it more effective to give large grants to a few elite researchers, or small grants to many researchers? Large grants would be more effective only if scientific impact increases as an accelerating function of grant size. Here, we examine the scientific impact of individual university-based researchers in three disciplines funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We considered four indices of scientific impact: numbers of articles published, numbers of citations to those articles, the most cited article, and the number of highly cited articles, each measured over a four-year period. We related these to the amount of NSERC funding received. Impact is positively, but only weakly, related to funding. Researchers who received additional funds from a second federal granting council, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, were not more productive than those who received only NSERC funding. Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be more productive.

Citation: Fortin J-M, Currie DJ (2013) Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65263. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065263
Editor: Vincent Larivière, Université de Montréal, Canada
Received: February 12, 2013; Accepted: April 23, 2013; Published: June 19, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Fortin, Currie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This study was funded by an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grant, and a work-study grant at the University of Ottawa to JMF, and a (mid-sized) grant from NSERC to DJC. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.