A call for transparency

Despite the surge in analysis and opinion pieces on the impact of large language models in academic writing, including grant proposals, there are basic questions that keep looming for many researchers at the beginning of their career journeys: how will I secure funding for my project? How can I win a grant to start my own group?

Writing in Nature Physics, researchers from ETH Zurich, the Central European University in Austria and the University of Palermo in Italy report their findings on the existing but scarcely studied connections between the European and American funding landscapes. Dr Nicolò Defenu, a researcher in the Institute for Theoretical Physics who has recently been appointed Assistant Professor of quantum physics, hopes that their study will encourage discussions on academic career paths.

Research summary: Imbalanced links

Defenu and co-authors Sandeep Chowdhary, Federico Musciotto and Federico Battiston analysed data representing over 6,000 winners of European Research Council (ERC) grants from eligible countries as of 2023. The data were sourced from the external page OpenAlex database. Looking at what the researchers call the fraction of cross-continental collaborations per research paper, they found that ERC winners count a large number of US-based collaborations in the early stages of their careers, especially before winning an ERC Starting Grant, and that these collaborations decrease sharply in number following the award. By contrast, for awardees of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US there is no clear trend that characterises their cross-continental collaborations: the fraction of their EU-based coworkers appears to remain unchanged over the first 20 years of their careers.

Defenu and colleagues unveiled a similar imbalance in the mobility of EU grant winners: at an early stage in their academic careers, EU-based ERC awardees are associated with a longer list of academic affiliations with respect to their US counterparts with a comparable 'academic age', which was calculated from the date of their first publication.

Further data analysis tested whether the observed trends and imbalances may come from intrinsic differences in the EU and US collaboration cultures. To this end, the researchers considered EU-based and US-based researchers – defined as scientists in OpenAlex who have at least 20 published papers and have EU- or US-only affiliations. They then computed the percentage of cross-continental co-authors for these two categories as a function of time and found that US-based scientists tend to collaborate with a larger number of EU-based colleagues compared to EU-based academics, especially at later career stages. Notably, EU-based researchers have fewer collaborations with US-based scientists than ERC winners. These results suggest a link between ERC grants and the US research landscape that cannot be readily explained through differences in cultural collaboration patterns in the EU and the US.

Defenu and co-authors also looked into the sharp decrease in cross-continental collaborations for ERC winners following the award of their grants by monitoring changes in the number of unique co-authors of ERC winners before an award and during a grant period. The team found that ERC awardees have more diverse collaborations after receiving their grant, a result indicating that the decrease in US-based collaborations isn't caused by an overall post-award downward trend. As a corollary, the team showed that EU countries contribute more to the collaboration network of an ERC winner than to that of an NSF winner.

The study encompasses all academic disciplines present in OpenAlex: these include biology, materials science and more. The trends are clearly visible in physics, but less so than in disciplines such as geology or medicine.