What is the relationship between research funding and citation-based performance? A comparative analysis between critical disciplines

The goal of the study here is to model and analyze the relation between research funding and citation-based performance in science to predict the diffusion of new scientific results in society. In fact, an important problem in the field of scientometrics is to explain factors determining the growth of citations in documents that can increase the diffusion of scientific results and the impact of science on society. The study here confronts this problem by developing a scientometric analysis to clarify, whenever possible, the relation between research funding and citations of articles in critical disciplines. Data of 2015 retrieved from the Web of Science database relating to the three critical disciplines given by computer science, medicine and economics are analyzed. Results suggest that computer science journals published more funded than unfunded papers. Medicine journals published equally funded and unfunded documents, and finally economics journals published more unfunded than funded papers. In addition, funded documents received more citations than unfunded papers in all three disciplines under study. The study also finds that citations in funded, unfunded and total (funded + unfunded) papers follow a power-law distribution in different disciplines. Another novel finding is that for all disciplines under study, the Matthew effect is greater for funded articles compared to unfunded documents. The results here can support best practices of research policy directed to fund vital scientific research for increasing the diffusion of science and scientific findings in society.