Despite spending on research and development booming in recent years, the competition for funding remains incredibly fierce.  As a result, many an hour of a researcher’s day is spent completing grant applications, which is not only deadly boring, but also obviously takes time away from their core job, be that teaching students or actually doing the research itself.

A recent paper highlights how research is increasingly driven not by the quality of ideas, but on the efficiency of researchers in applying for grants.  The authors explain that the success rate of applications has dropped considerably from the 40-50% of successful applicants in the 1970s.  The main reason for this is that the funding has not grown anywhere near as quickly as the pool of researchers, especially in STEM topics.

It’s resulted in just 20% of applications receiving funding in 2003, and just 8% doing so in 2013.  It’s a shift that has fundamentally changed the nature of the grant-application process.

“When agencies only fund the top 10 or 20 percent, they aren’t just separating bad ideas from good ideas,” the authors explain. “They’re also separating good from good.”

Changing science

This has a considerable impact on the grant application process.  Firstly, it means that scientists must apply for more grants as their success rate is so much lower.  Secondly, it rewards those who are most proficient at submitting grant applications rather than those necessarily with the best ideas.

In the paper, they describe the grant-application process using the economic theory of contests, in which teams compete to do something for a ‘buyer’.  The buyer picks the winner, keeps the fruits of their labor, and the supplier then gets a prize.  They use the Netflix Prize as an example of such a contest.

“If we were to apply contest theory to grants, then professors are the ones competing to create a product—the best grant application—for the agency,” they explain. “That’s not a particularly good system, though, because the funding agency doesn’t want grant applications for their own sake. They want to fund research.”

By funding just 10-15% of applications, it renders the practice of science wholly inefficient, as the costs associated with producing the perfect grant application outweigh the value of the science produced.

An alternative approach

The researchers built a model to test an alternative approach that relies upon a partial lottery scheme.  This would see funds allocated via a random draw among a pool of high-ranking grants.  This would have the benefit of creating a lower bar for a smaller prize, the researchers believe this would result in less time being taken up by application writing.

Suffice to say, a partial lottery is not the only option for changing the funding system.  The authors also suggest grant awards be made purely on merit, with the track record of each researcher the deciding factor.  This would present obvious difficulties for early-career researchers who don’t have such a track record.  Another option is a hybrid system, with the lottery approach for those early in their career and a merit-based system for those later in their career.

“There are many potential routes out of the current hole,” the authors conclude. “What doesn’t change is our conclusion that the current grant-application system is fundamentally inefficient and unsustainable.”