谁能获得国家自然科学基金的资助?

Who can receive national nature science research grant?

本文以2007-2011年间20种经济管理学术期刊中学术文章为样本,构建基于文章合作者的学术网络,分析学者的网络位置对其获取管理学部国家自然科学基金资助可能性的影响,研究结果发现:(1)处于网络中心的学者比较容易获取基金资助;(2)富含结构洞的学者要比拥有较少结构洞的学者获得基金资助的可能性更大;(3)学者发表文章的数量也有利于其获得基金资助;(4)获得基金资助的经历提高其再次获得基金资助的可能性;(5)211学校的学者在获取基金资助方面具有明显的优势。(6)处于网络中心位置的学者,发表文章的数量对其获得基金资助的正向作用比较微弱,而远离网络中心位置学者,文章发表的数量对其获得国家自然科学基金资助的影响作用较强。研究结果在一定程度上揭示了获得国家自然科学基金资助学者的特征。

It is widely known that more scientific research activity could help yield rapid social progress. The quality of scientific research is the key to the future of a country. Scientific research with the characteristics of public goods is widely regarded as a classic case of market failure. Government should spend public money on creating research funds to encourage scientific research. NSFC is the major source of funds in the field of management science in China. Because NSFC has a limited amount of funding, it is very competitive for proposers to receive the grant. According to the NSFC website, NSFC receives approximately 4,811 proposals of general program projects in the field of management science, of which approximately 764 are funded in 2012. Only 15.88% of proposals are awarded. Receiving the award is an indication of the outstanding quality and expertise of a prospoal, a research team or a scientist. For some universities in China, an essential element in professional promotion and research performance is to be awarded a grant from the National Nature ScienceFoundation of China. This study seeks an answer to the following questions： Who can receive the national nature science research grant？ What are the characteristics of the awarded proposers？ Academic networks are social networks constructed by connecting actors if they have scientific collaboration or communication. The co-authorship is the main collaboration pattern of scientific collaboration. The frequency of interaction between coauthors would positively influence knowledge creation in the field of both nature science and social science. In this study, we developed a co-authorship network based on top 20 economics and management journals from 2007 to 2011. Two measurements of network attributes, such as structural hole and centrality, are calculated by using pajek program. We construct a new database by matching the characteristics of academic network at individual level with the number of NSFC awards received by scholars for the period 1999-2013. First, The Probit models are used to estimate the effect of the network position of scholars on the probability of national nature science fund proposal approval. Secondly, we carried out a number of robustness checks on our results. We use the Logit models to verify the contribution of the network position to the chance of receiving the grant. We also consider the sample of scholars who obtain the NSFC grant once to explore whether the results change. Furthermore, the lagged effect of the network position of scholars on the getting the grant is examined. Those results are consistent with previous studies. The final sections consist of conclusions, limitation and future research directions. The main empirical findings can be summarized as follows：（1） Scholars who occupy a central network position are easier to receive the NSFC grant support;（2） Scholars with abundant structural holes have more chance to get NSFC grant than managers with fewer structural holes;（3） Scholars have better chance of success if they have more publications;（4） Scholars who have been supported by NSFC previously also improve the possibility of NSFC grant proposal approval;（5）The affiliation with the ＂211＂ project universities has a significant positive impact on the approval of scholars＇ grant proposals; and（6） The positive effect of publications on obtaining NSFC grant support increases as scholar＇s network position decreases. Based on these results, we can predict which kind of network features can help scholars obtain NSFC grant.