科研基金撤项的实证分析

An Empirical Study of Terminated National Research Projects

改革开放40年,中国科技体制改革和科研诚信建设也在不断前进。但遗憾的是学界目前对该领域的实证研究还很少见,基于资助项目撤销或终止的微观分析仍是空白。聚焦国家社科基金,从多个维度对国家社科2000—2015年期间的终止/撤项信息进行整理和分析。结果发现,国家社科项目撤项在学科、区域、负责人科研资历以及所在研究单位均呈现分布不均的现象。被终止/撤销的项目近80%是由于长期拖延未按时结项导致。随着项目清理工作的常规化和制度化的推进,国家社科基金项目被终止或撤项时延呈总体下降趋势。文末从契约视角对撤项进行解读,对未来我国科研诚信与项目管理的研究与建设提出建议。

Research integrity is the cornerstone of national science and technology innovation system.China’s development in science,technology and innovation has made great strides over the last four decades whist its construction of research integrity has been groping with a relative slow pace.Unfortunately micro-level analysis on the topic of research integrity is rather scarce.To fill in some research gap,the study constructed a unique dataset of all projects funded by National Social Science Fund over the period of 2000-2015 with terminated projects identified by publically released debarment notices.Our analysis reveals that there exists huge heterogeneity among terminated projects in discipline,principal investigators’position,affiliation,and region.Overall the elapsed time of terminated projects demonstrated a downward trend.Most of the termination occurred during the phase of project clean-up.The long delay of project completion and the incapability of delivering research outputs accounts for nearly 80%of the terminations.The paper ends with results discussion in the framework of principal-agent theory.Suggestions are also proposed for the future study and practice of research integrity construction and project management.