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Why many funding schemes harm rather than support research

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 607–608 (2022)Cite this article

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To the editor — Researchers are spending an increasing fraction of their time applying for funding. However, despite extensive efforts invested in applications and evaluations, the current funding system appears to largely fail in its task of reliably ranking the relative research quality of proposals1,2,3. Hence, the current funding system to a considerable degree represents a lottery — and a strikingly inefficient one at that4,5,6.

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Fig. 1: Associations between time investment, funding rates and net return of funding schemes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Die Junge Akademie, Berlin, Germany

    Martin Dresler, Eva Buddeberg, Ulrike Endesfelder, Jan Haaker, Christian Hof, Robert Kretschmer, Dirk Pflüger & Fabian Schmidt

  2. Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Martin Dresler

  3. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

    Eva Buddeberg

  4. Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Ulrike Endesfelder

  5. University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany

    Jan Haaker

  6. Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany

    Christian Hof

  7. Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany

    Robert Kretschmer

  8. University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Dirk Pflüger

  9. Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany

    Fabian Schmidt

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  1. Martin Dresler
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  2. Eva Buddeberg
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  5. Christian Hof
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Correspondence to Martin Dresler.

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Dresler, M., Buddeberg, E., Endesfelder, U. et al. Why many funding schemes harm rather than support research. Nat Hum Behav 6, 607–608 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01286-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01286-3

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