More money, more science? : how the malaria research community responds to funding opportunities

Abstract

Agencies that fund research shape both the rate and direction of scientific progress through the resource allocation choices they make. However, our understanding of the degree to which scientists respond to shifts in that allocation is very limited. How does the scientific community reorganize itself and gain new entrants? How do research priorities change? What collaborative arrangements are formed with the advent of more funding? In this study malaria research is used as a setting in which to explore these critical issues. This provides a useful context not only because it is a relatively small and easily identifiable research community, but also because funding for malaria research has increased more than fourfold over the past 15 years first through a large expansion of the NIH budget and subsequently through the entry of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. This provides a quasi-experimental setting to explore how scientific communities react to funding incentives. In particular changes in productivity of scientists, the entry of other biologists into the field of malaria, the diversity of the scientific community and individual research lines pursued, and the collaborative agreements struck, are examined here. The research methods include a bibliometric analysis of the malaria publication space and extensive interviews and discussions with malaria researchers and global health experts. The analysis suggests that when funding is scaled up rapidly, scientific output increases at diminishing returns. Publication growth was accounted for primarily by the entry of scientists into the field of malaria in the late 1990s and onwards, while individual productivity rates remained flat in the advent of more funding. Furthermore, there was a shift in research emphasis towards more applied translational research, particularly drug and vaccine development. Finally, the network of researchers and policy makers became more collaborative, but also concentrated decision making power into the hands of a small, tight-knit global health community.