1. Theoretical research without projects
- Author
-
Miguel Navascués and Costantino Budroni
- Subjects
Budgets ,Science and Technology Workforce ,Financial Management ,Operations research ,Economics ,Computer science ,Social Sciences ,Efficiency ,Careers in Research ,Scholarly communication ,Academic Performance ,Salaries ,Mathematics - Optimization and Control ,Multidisciplinary ,Financing, Organized ,Research Assessment ,Professions ,Work (electrical) ,Research Design ,Medicine ,Science policy ,Research Article ,Physics - Physics and Society ,Science Policy ,Science ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Research Grants ,Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) ,Bibliometrics ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Research Funding ,Resource Allocation ,Financial management ,Research Support as Topic ,FOS: Mathematics ,Humans ,Computer Simulation ,Productivity ,Models, Statistical ,business.industry ,Models, Theoretical ,Scholarly Communication ,Optimization and Control (math.OC) ,Labor Economics ,People and Places ,Scientists ,Resource allocation ,Population Groupings ,business ,Finance - 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., Some edits to the published version
- Published
- 2019