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Funding ratios in social science: the perspective of countries/territories level and comparison with natural sciences

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Abstract

Research funding plays a key role in current science, thus it has become an aggregative interesting level in scientometric analysis. In this work, we try to explore the funding ratios of 21 major countries/territories in social science based on 813,809 research articles collected from the Web of Science and indexed by the Social Sciences Citation Index covering the period from 2009 to 2013. The results show that the funding ratios of sample countries/territories in social science are far below that in natural science and some specific subjects (chemistry, engineering, physics, neurosciences). However, there is a positive correlation between them. The funding ratios of People’s Republic of China, Sweden and Japan rank the top 3 (over 30 %). Generally, the funding ratios of the top 1 % and top 10 % highly cited articles are higher than those of the rest of articles, and for most cases, the high funding ratio of all articles is related to the high funding ratio of the highly cited articles.

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Acknowledgments

This work was improved by thoughtful comments of two anonymous reviewers and was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 12CTQ049). The authors acknowledge Dr. Lin Lili and Mr. Alejandro Alda for helping us to revise the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, Business School, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Xin Xu & Star X. Zhao

  2. Department of Information Resource Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Alice M. Tan

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  1. Xin Xu
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  2. Alice M. Tan
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  3. Star X. Zhao
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Correspondence to Star X. Zhao.

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Xu, X., Tan, A.M. & Zhao, S.X. Funding ratios in social science: the perspective of countries/territories level and comparison with natural sciences. Scientometrics 104, 673–684 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1633-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1633-3

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