Abstract
The role that grant funding should play in the conduct and evaluation of psychological science is controversial, largely because few data are available to directly inform this issue. We sought to gain insights on grant funding in psychological science by examining the extent to which grant funding influenced eminent psychologists in their research pursuits. Participants were recruited from a compiled, published list of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era (N = 108). Participants were asked about their history of grant funding, including whether their most significant empirical publication received grant funding; participants were also asked about the perceived impact of grant funding on their scholarly productivity and creativity. Virtually all participants had career histories of external funding and reported that they received external funding for their most important published study. Whereas a small minority reported that funding had hindered their creativity, most reported that funding facilitated both their scholarly productivity and creativity. Open-ended comments revealed more nuance to these findings – a slim majority reported that grant funding positively impacted their scholarship whereas an important minority reported that grant funding negatively impacted their scholarship. In sum, our results indicate that grant funding is an important, albeit fallible, marker of eminence in psychological science. Still, even among successful, eminent psychologists, perceptions of grant funding are not invariably positive. Future research is needed to clarify the extent to which grant funding is biased in favor of eminence and to examine the necessity of grant funding for influential psychological research.
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Data Accessibility
Study measures and dataset from this research are available at https://osf.io/8e7cx/.
Notes
Because Diener et al. ranked only the first 200 psychologists, not the remaining 148, in terms of eminence, we were unable to use eminence rankings as a predictor in our analyses.
Birth year was positively correlated with responding to the survey (r = .19, p = .02), indicating that younger psychologists were more likely to respond. Additionally, h index was significantly positively related to responding (r = .14, p = .04), suggesting that psychologists with a higher h index were more likely to respond.
When participants provided a range for their estimates of either the number of federal/governmental or private/foundation grants received (e.g., 15–20) or the amounts of received public or private grant funding (e.g., $60–70 million dollars), the two estimates were averaged. For participants who reported dollar amounts in Euros, these amounts were converted to U.S. dollars.
For h index differences across subdisciplines in addition to response rate differences, refer to Supplemental Materials 2.
The corresponding correlations with raw (nontransformed) citation impact were also not significant.
Controlling statistically for the year of publication of the most important empirical contribution did not alter this pattern of results, as both correlations remained not significant.
The correlation between raw (nontransformed) private/foundation funding and career citation impact was not statistically significant (r = .20, p = .06). Further, controlling statistically for year of doctoral degree received did not alter this pattern of results. However, statistically controlling for year of birth rendered this correlation non-significant.
After controlling statistically for year of doctoral degree received and date of birth, the correlations between number of governmental/federal grants and citation impact were statistically significant (degree year: r = .20, p = .046; birth year: r = .23, p = .04).
The correlation between raw (nontransformed) number of private/foundation grants and citation impact was also not statistically significant.
We are grateful to the participants who kindly agreed to allow us to anonymously reproduce their comments verbatim in this section of the manuscript.
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Contributed to conception and design: SOL, RDL.
Contributed to acquisition of data: SOL, SMB, ANS, CJL.
Contributed to analysis and interpretation of data: SOL, RDL, ANS, SMB, ANS, CJL, THC, KAN.
Drafted and/or revised the article: SOL, RDL, SMB, ANS, THC.
Approved the originally submitted version for publication: SOL, RDL, SMB, ANS, CJL, THC, KAN.
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The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. Dr. Latzman is currently employed by Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA, USA.
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Lilienfeld, S.O., Bowes, S.M., Strother, A.N. et al. On the Association between Grants and Scholarly Achievement among the World’s Most Eminent Psychologists. Curr Psychol 42, 29325–29336 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03911-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03911-4