Research performance and scholarly communication profile of competitive research funding: the case of Academy of Finland

Abstract

AbstractThe Academy of Finland (AKA), Finland’s major public research funding agency, uses a Web of Science (WoS) based bibliometric indicator to assess the performance of research it has funded. We use an alternative methodology to compare (1) the research performance and (2) the scholarly communication profile of AKA-funded research to the Finnish universities’ entire output across the major fields of arts and sciences. Our data consists of 142,742 publications (years 2015–2018) registered in the national information service, which integrates Current Research Information System (CRIS) data of 13 Finnish universities. Research performance is analyzed using the Finnish community-curated expert-based rating of publication channels (so-called JUFO). Our results show that compared to the Finnish universities’ entire output a larger share of AKA-funded research is published in leading JUFO rated journals and book publishers. JUFO and WoS-based indicators produced consonant results regarding the performance of AKA-funded research. Analysis of publication profiles shows that AKA-funded research is more focused than the universities’ output on using peer-reviewed publications, articles published in journals, English language, foreign publishers and open access publishing. We conclude that the CRIS-based publication data can support multidimensional assessments of research performance and scholarly communication profiles, potentially also in other countries and institutions. CRIS development and maintenance require multi-stakeholder commitment, resources and incentives to ensure data quality and coverage. To fully recognize diverse open science practices and to enable international comparisons, CRISs need further development and integration as data sources.