Characterizing researchers to study research funding agency impacts: The case of the European Research Council's Starting Grants

We describe the development and testing of a framework to characterize researchers individually (a profile) and in aggregate (as types) at the first stage, baseline step of a controlled, two-stage study of public research funding agency impacts. Our framework characterizes researcher attitudes and attributes, and conditions and opportunities experienced, addressing: 'demographic' factors; researcher 'approach'; and 'standing' (organizational career, knowledge community career, and local and national research environment aspects). This integrated demographic-approach-standing (DAS) framework is tested using a survey of 184 applicants to the inaugural, 2007 call for the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants (StG). Successful applicants are characterized to match-pair with a control group of quality-screened unsuccessful applicants. Given the inherent difficulty to identify in advance the 'frontier' researchers the ERC aims to fund with its StG, we characterize 'frontier-potential' factors that might lead researchers later to become regarded as frontier. We develop researcher types using several of our framework elements: researcher intellectual field mobility; novelty and risk-taking; independence; output productivity; and local research workplace standing. We find a variety of grantee types, but primarily not yet independent researchers whose 'standing' could be impacted upon by the early-career StG scheme. Lastly, we suggest impact pathways between types we could capture following a second stage survey, and discuss limitations to our framework including revising it to characterize better local research environment aspects. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.