Indicator‐assisted evaluation and funding of research: Visualizing the influence of grants on the number and citation counts of research papers

Abstract

Abstract This article reports research on analyzing and visualizing the impact of governmental funding on the amount and citation counts of research publications. For the first time, grant and publication data appear interlinked in one map. We start with an overview of related work and a discussion of available techniques. A concrete example—grant and publication data from Behavioral and Social Science Research, one of four extramural research programs at the National Institute on Aging (NIA)—is analyzed and visualized using the VxInsight® visualization tool. The analysis also illustrates current existing problems related to the quality and existence of data, data analysis, and processing. The article concludes with a list of recommendations on how to improve the quality of grant‐publication maps and a discussion of research challenges for indicator‐assisted evaluation and funding of research.