Funding decisions, peer review, and scientific excellence in physical sciences, chemistry, and geosciences

This article presents an analysis of the funding policies of three research councils at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The key issue is the extent to which these three councils recognized scientific excellence, and particularly, whether they succeeded in rewarding the grants of the most successful and influential researchers. Data on grant applications provided by NWO for the time period 2000--4 were combined with bibliometric indicators of past research performance of applicants and non-applicants derived from Thomson Reuters' Web of Science. It is found that the three councils did support scientific excellence, in the following sense. Firstly, they tend to attract research proposals from the better groups in the fields they cover. Secondly, the applicants whose submitted proposals were granted--and the research groups they represent--tend to generate a higher citation impact at their international research fronts than those whose submissions were rejected. Although there are some differences in the outcomes among the three councils, this conclusion is valid for each council. On the other hand, for applicants with more than three granted applications we observed a rather variable pattern: in one council these performed at the same level as researchers whose applications were all rejected; in another council these applicants outperformed the rejected applicants; and in another council the number of applicants with more than three granted applications was very small. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.