The effectiveness of Japanese public funding to generate emerging topics in life science and medicine

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE The effectiveness of Japanese public funding to generate emerging topics in life science and medicine Ryosuke L. Ohniwa ID1,2*, Kunio Takeyasu3,4, Aiko Hibino5 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 1 Faculty of Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, 2 College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 3 Center for Biotechnology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 4 Graduate School of Biostudies, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 5 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hirosaki University, Hirosaki, Japan * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Ohniwa RL, Takeyasu K, Hibino A (2023) The effectiveness of Japanese public funding to generate emerging topics in life science and medicine. PLoS ONE 18(8): e0290077. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290077 Editor: Claudia Noemi González Brambila, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, MEXICO Received: April 12, 2023 Accepted: August 1, 2023 Published: August 17, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Ohniwa et al. 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. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting information files. Funding: This work was supported by JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) KAKENHI (GiA for Scientific Research (C)) to R.L.O. [grant number 20K00266]. JSPS website; https://www. jsps.go.jp/english/ 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. Understanding the effectiveness of public funds to generate emerging topics will assist policy makers in promoting innovation. In the present study, we aim to clarify the effectiveness of grants to generate emerging topics in life sciences and medicine since 1991 with regard to Japanese researcher productivity and grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. To clarify how large grant amounts and which categories are more effective in generating emerging topics from both the PI and investment perspectives, we analyzed awarded PI publications containing emerging keywords (EKs; the elements of emerging topics) before and after funding. Our results demonstrated that, in terms of grant amounts, while PIs tended to generate more EKs with larger grants, the most effective investment from the perspective of investor side was found in the smallest amount range for each PI (less than 5 million JPY /year). Second, in terms of grant categories, we found that grant categories providing smaller amounts for diverse researchers without excellent past performance records were more effective from the investment perspective to generate EK. Our results suggest that offering smaller, widely dispersed grants rather than large, concentrated grants is more effective in promoting the generation of emerging topics in life science and medicine. Introduction Emerging topics (ETs) in basic research, covering emerging technologies, methodologies, issues, and scientific concepts, are reported in scientific articles and become fundamental resources for innovation [1–3]. Meanwhile, in research and development fields, new topics are constantly and cyclically emerging, maturing, converging, and fading out [2, 4, 5]. In the face of such a synergistic and dynamic situation, funding strategies to support efficient generation of ETs, especially successful and high-impact varieties, is critical for policy making. For industries, outcomes and knowledge from research activities undertaken by universities and public research institutions supported by public funds are an important source of information for both generating R&D and completing existing projects [6, 7]. For example, patents, PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290077 August 17, 2023 1 / 19 PLOS ONE The effectiveness of Japanese public funding to generate emerging topics in life science and medicine especially in life science and medicine, tend to cite scientific articles supported by public funds [8, 9]. Here, outside of published articles, the success of industrial innovation based on public scientific outcomes also requires well-managed collaborative research projects and communication between industry and researchers in public institutions [10, 11]. However, scientific articles supported by public funds remain a significant resource for innovation [10, 12, 13]. Diverse studies have reported the effectiveness of public funds on productivity and citation impact of scientific articles as systematically reviewed by Aagaard et al. [14]. A major discussion point in past studies is whether funds should be concentrated only on excellent researchers or be distributed equally among all researchers. In other words, is big science or small science better? In empirical studies, both “too small” and “too large” research grants have been reported as inappropriate to guarantee balanced productivity/impact and funding streams [15–17]. At the same time, the issue of investing solely in researchers with excellent track records remains controversial [18–20]. While studies focusing on citation impact have well demonstrated the association between funds and high-impact research outcomes, the evaluation of associations between funds and generation of novel or emerging topics has been poorly undertaken. This is due to extensive lag between publication and recognition of research articles reporting highly novel or emerging topics [21]. Indeed, articles containing novel topics tend to be produced on the rareness of prior work combinations [22, 23] and tend to appear in lower-impact journals, increasing lag time between publication and citation [24]. However, these articles are eventually cited at a higher rate than articles containing less-novel topics [24]. When we previously compared journal impact factors with the frequency of emerging keywords (elements of ETs) per article in the journal, a slight correlation could be found only in the ranges where impact factors were less than 20 [25]. Thus, any evaluation focusing on articles with high citations over short time periods hardly uncovers the effectiveness of funding on generating novel and ETs over the medium or long term. Another missing viewpoint in past studies is overall return on investment. Many studies have reported the average or median number of publications/citations per awarded researcher as well as correlations between funding and productivity per awarded researcher [19, 20, 26– 33]. While these analyses have clarified the effectiveness of funding on the awarded researcher side, the effect on all researchers remains unclear since it is well known that about 15% to 20% researchers produce 50% of pub (...truncated)