A bibliometric assessment of research council grants in linguistics

To assess the funding policy of a research council in linguistics, the research performance of researchers supported by its grants (“grantees’) was compared with that of other researchers (‘non-grantees’). For three subfields of linguistics, publication and citation behaviour were examined. Although publications in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) source journals were cited about twice as often as other publication types, the latter were produced more often. Productivity and impact of both grantees and the graduate students supported by the grant were contrasted with non-grantees publishing in ‘core’ journals primarily devoted to linguistics and more peripheral journals. Grantees were more likely to be highly productive and produced significantly more highly cited articles than non-grantees. Although both grantees and non-grantees were cited well above the international level, articles by grantees showed a faster diffusion, and had a higher impact in both core and peripheral journals. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.