NWB2023_Who funds Nordic research?

Funding is imperative for academic research and can be provided by, among others, governments and private companies. Here, using a dataset of ~245,000 research articles sourced from the Web of Science and Incites Benchmarking & Analytics over the period 2016 to 2021 inclusive, funding for Nordic-authored research is analysed. The dominant funding source (~80% of all articles) is from countries within the European Union (EU). However, on a continent level, only funding from Asia, specifically China, increases in terms of percentage share over the period (14% to 19%). Within the EU, the main funding source (30% of all articles) is the European Commission, as well as countries’ own research councils or academies (particularly Sweden, Norway and Finland). Outside the EU, funding from US government health bodies (e.g., National Institute of Health - NIH) is prominent but has decreased (12% to 9.5%). Funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has also declined (10.5% to 7.5%) over the period, possibly a consequence of Brexit. Notably, the impact of Nordic research declines over the period - all top 10 funders (by publication count) saw their Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI) stagnate or decrease, particularly UKRI and NIH whose values halved from above 6 to around 3. Using Citation Topics to define research areas, forty percent of funded research covers Clinical and Life Sciences. This is the most funded area for all 10 largest funders, bar the National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Science Foundation where Physics is the most funded area.