How Does National Scientific Funding Support Emerging Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison Study of Big Data Research in the US and China

RESEARCH ARTICLE How Does National Scientific Funding Support Emerging Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison Study of Big Data Research in the US and China Ying Huang1, Yi Zhang1,2, Jan Youtie3, Alan L. Porter4, Xuefeng Wang1* a11111 1 School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China, 2 Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia, 3 Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, United States of America, 4 School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, United States of America * OPEN ACCESS Citation: Huang Y, Zhang Y, Youtie J, Porter AL, Wang X (2016) How Does National Scientific Funding Support Emerging Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison Study of Big Data Research in the US and China. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0154509. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0154509 Editor: James Wilsdon, University of Sheffield, UNITED KINGDOM Received: August 11, 2015 Accepted: April 14, 2016 Published: May 24, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Huang 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. Abstract How do funding agencies ramp-up their capabilities to support research in a rapidly emerging area? This paper addresses this question through a comparison of research proposals awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in the field of Big Data. Big data is characterized by its size and difficulties in capturing, curating, managing and processing it in reasonable periods of time. Although Big Data has its legacy in longstanding information technology research, the field grew very rapidly over a short period. We find that the extent of interdisciplinarity is a key aspect in how these funding agencies address the rise of Big Data. Our results show that both agencies have been able to marshal funding to support Big Data research in multiple areas, but the NSF relies to a greater extent on multi-program funding from different fields. We discuss how these interdisciplinary approaches reflect the research hot-spots and innovation pathways in these two countries. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Introduction Funding: This research is supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation (award no. 1527370), the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2014AA015105), the General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 71373019). Besides, the authors are grateful for the scholarship provided by the China Scholarship Council (CSC Student ID 201406030005). The funders had no role in study design, data collection Dramatic advances resulting from the rapid pace of technological developments and new interdisciplinary fields are on the horizon [1]. Science and engineering research continually evolves beyond the boundaries of single disciplines and offers employment opportunities that require not only depth of knowledge but also breadth of knowledge, integration, synthesis, and an array of skills. Interdisciplinary research (IDR), defined as work which integrates theories, methods, tools and/or concepts from multiple specialized knowledge bases, is often treated as proxy for research to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice [2, 3]. Since IDR is increasingly prominent today, compiling reflections on its premises and issues could serve PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0154509 May 24, 2016 1 / 20 How Does Scientific Funding Support Interdisciplinary Research and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. those engaged in R&D analysis, policy and management [4], and accelerate the process of scientific discoveries and societal problem solving. Interdisciplinarity has three distinct components that are typically taken into account: Variety, Balance and Disparity [5]. Shannon entropy [6] and Simpson [7] offered popular diversity indices in the ecological literature and more recently in the interdisciplinarity literature to capture both variety and balance of referenced disciplines. Furthermore, Rao [8] and Stirling [5] proposed disparity as the third dimension, and Rao-Stirling diversity was a composite measure of the three diversity components [5]. Further indicators, based on the above theoretical foundations, have been proposed to measure IDR, including network coherence [9], specialization scores [10], the integration score [11, 12], the diffusion score [13], and other improved indicators [14, 15]. However, most of bibliometric literatures on measuring IDR focuses on the outputs of science, or publications [16]. Less emphasis has been placed on inputs, such as research proposals, which typically contain broader information than research articles. Proposals reflect on academic individuals, networks, and evolutionary processes of science and directly indicate overarching research programs, which, if funded, can lead to multiple publications [17]. In general, research proposals are granted by national governments and aimed to support academic institutions and R&D departments to conduct basic research, the content of which focuses on new ideas, concepts, and potential innovative actions. Understanding of funding proposals could be considered as an express path to reveal how evolutionary R&D pathways work in given countries, regions, and research fields [18]. Scientific funding plays an essential role in individual scientific research, university discipline construction, and national innovation system patterns [19]. Previous research on scientific funding has focused on research investments [20], optimization design for peer review [21], and funding distribution [22]. In addition, evaluations of the social impact [23, 24] and performance [25, 26] of science funding reflect an evaluative perspective on funding research. As science increasingly deals with boundary-spanning problems, various policy and funding initiatives have been developed to encourage interdisciplinary research to push forward academic capability and accelerate scientific discovery. National scientific funding organizations specifically support research, including investigations of an interdisciplinary nature, through a variety of target methods [24]. As the two leading scientific funding organizations in the world, National Science Foundation (NSF) of the US and National Natural Science Foundation of China (N (...truncated)