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As a student, I would sometimes look at the careers of researchers in my field and be surprised at how they abandoned promising research lines and started working on something less interesting. Now I understand they often simply did the research they could get funded.
As a general rule (with many exceptions) it’s easier to get less interesting research funded. For the same reason that as a student, is easier to get an A if you choose a well-defined essay topic where you already know a lot and all the information is readily available.
Something I did not understand until later in the game is that there exists a category of researchers who get lots of grant money but don’t have a lot of impact, as measured by e.g. citations or awards. They have simply optimized their skills for grant writing success.
These people fulfill a valuable role in the ecosystem and therefore tend to be highly rewarded by their home institutions. But that this kind of niche exists is a symptom of certain inherent problems with distribution grant money based on research proposals.
The justification for distributing research money based on research proposals is that the most promising and important research would get funded. But generally, we don’t know what works and gives us important results before we try it.
To put it another way, if we know enough about what we’re trying to do to be able to plan it in advance, we’re not doing anything ambitious. In the words of @kenneth0stanley and @joelbot3000, “greatness cannot be planned”.
Because we don’t know how good the research is going to be, money is distributed based on how good the proposal is. Writing proposals is a very different skill from doing research. A key component is finding a topic that fits the tastes of the funder and is easy to write about.
All of us need to keep getting funding to be able to maintain a lab. Few researchers are able to consistently get their core research interests funded. Most of us need to follow the gradient of money with respect to proposal content.
I think research progress in general would greatly benefit if we removed the perverting effect of grant-hunting. I don’t know how exactly to do this best. But here are some thoughts about what might be better ways of distributing grant money:
* Research funds should be more equally distributed;
* Larger parts of the funds should go directly to PhD students as scholarships, letting the students choose who to work with;
* When PIs apply for funds, outcome should be based more on recent research productivity.
* Larger parts of the funds should go directly to PhD students as scholarships, letting the students choose who to work with;
* When PIs apply for funds, outcome should be based more on recent research productivity.
Some people would argue that we need big grants for big projects that can only be done with lots of people and equipment. I disagree. Nothing stops many researchers with individual small grants from collaborating on projects they care for. That’s (mostly) how Linux was developed.
