The Academics' Forum: An Investigation of Research Grants
as Reflected in Published Articles
Sylvia G. Roch
University at Albany
Given the increasing importance many universities place on grants, it may be useful to know what percentage of published articles is supported by research grants and what types of grants are represented in published articles. Given the applied nature of industrial and organizational psychology, many of the traditional governmental funding agencies that heavily fund other areas of psychology do not often fund research in industrial and organizational psychology. One way of gaining a glimpse of the state of funding in I-O psychology is to examine published articles to see how many of them acknowledge funding and what kind. Granted, this is much less than a scientific approach. For example, the U.S. military is an important source of funding for I-O psychology projects, but it is possible that many of these projects are only reported in technical reports, The Military Psychologist, or in outlets other than mainstream I-O psychology journals. Nonetheless, taking a look at the type of organizational affiliation of individuals reporting funding and the type of funding they report may provide a useful snapshot of the state of funding for I-O psychologists.
Thus, with the help of my research assistants, I decided to conduct an admittedly rough investigation of the type of funding reported in articles published between 2003 and 2008 in five journals. Authors were placed in one of six categories according to their reported affiliation: psychology department, business or management department or school, private organization, government organization (not military), military, or other. Funding source was categorized according to one of 12 categories, as reflected in Table 1. Initially I chose to examine the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes because these journals were ranked as the top four by I-O psychologists in Zickar and Highhouse’s (2001) review of the top journals. However, until recently, OBHDP did not report specific author affiliation; in other words, until recently only the university was reported and not the department or school. Thus, I removed OBHDP from the list and replaced it with the Journal of Management and Journal of Organizational Behavior, ranked 8th and 13th respectively according to Zickar and Highhouse. Thus, we examined 5 years of articles published in five journals for a total of approximately 1,650 articles. Overall, about 30% of the research reported in these journals is funded according to the acknowledgement section of the articles. The Academy of Management Journal reported the highest percentage of funded research (39%), followed by the Journal of Applied Psychology (35%), and the Journal of Management reported the lowest percentage of funded research (18%). Please see Figure 1 for the breakdown by journal. Table 1 presents the breakdown of funding source by journal, along with overall percentages by funding type. It should be noted that we coded up to four funding sources per article. A number of articles reported more than one funding source, 122 articles (7.4%) reported two funding sources, 39 articles (2.4%) reported 3, and 3 articles (.2%) reported 4 funding sources. However, given that relatively few studies reported three or more funding sources, only the first two funding sources are reported in Table 1.
Figure 1. Percentage of funded research by journal.
It appears that the most common source of funding was a management/business school, followed by other university funding and other governmental funding. This “other governmental funding” category was designed to represent government funding that did not mention a specific U.S. government agency. The most common type of funding represented in this category was funding provided by a non-U.S. government, such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and the RGC (UK) Research Grants Council. Funding from the National Science Foundation, a traditional funding source for many areas of psychology, only accounted for 13% of the funding reported in the journal articles examined but did place 5th in terms of representing the most common type of funding. Overall, it appears that researchers look to a wide variety of funding sources to support their research.
However, not only I-O psychologists publish in these journals. As seen in Table 2, the majority of the affiliations associated with the first author are from a business/management department or school. Granted, many I-O psychologists are affiliated with business and management departments and schools; however, to receive a more in-depth view of authors who are predominately I-O psychologists, I focused on the grants received by authors in psychology departments. It should be noted that some of the authors may be in areas of psychology other than I-O psychology but most likely the majority are I-O psychologists, which is likely not the case for business schools and departments. Unfortunately, there was no definitive way of determining which authors identify themselves as I-O psychologists, other than directly contacting the authors of the 1,650 articles, which was not possible.
Thus, I examined the data with only authors in psychology departments selected. I examined the data in two ways; (a) specifying that the first author must be from a psychology department (resulting in 108 articles reporting funding) and (b) specifying that at least one of the authors must be from a psychology department (resulting in 144 articles reporting funding). We coded for the first five authors for each article. When the first author was from a psychology department, the article was slightly more likely to report grant funding than the overall sample (33% vs. 30%). This difference is at best minimal; it appears that about a third of the articles in these journals report funding regardless of whether the authors are psychologists.
Table 3 reports the number and percentage of funded articles according to funding source and according to whether the first author reported an affiliation with a psychology department or any author reported a psychology department affiliation. It should be noted that the numbers do not add up to the number of articles reporting funding because if articles reported more than one funding source, the first two funding sources were included in the table. The percentages are very similar to those reported in the larger sample, with the exception that the percentage of funding from a business or management department or school is much smaller, which is to be expected given the criteria that either the first author or at least one author must represent a psychology department. Military funding represents a larger percentage of the funding in this sample (approximately 10% versus 5% in the overall sample), as does government funding not mentioning a specific agency (approximately 20% for this sample versus 5% of the overall sample). The rest of the funding sources appear to be within 3 percentage points of the overall sample. Thus, it also appears that researchers affiliated with psychology departments rely on a wide variety of funding sources to support their research.
In conclusion, it appears that as best as can be determined by examining the published literature, the majority of the articles published by I-O psychologists represent unfunded research, suggesting that I-O psychologists can conduct high-quality research without outside funding. Of course, this does not imply that I-O psychologists publish without outside assistance. Often private organizations will support data collection efforts without providing an official grant. Nonetheless, it appears that the majority of our research is not funded, and when it is funded, we rely on a wide range of funding sources.
In hindsight, I should have included some of my favorite journals, such as Human Performance and the International Journal of Selection and Assessment. I would not be surprised if these journals report larger percentages of authors affiliated with psychology departments, but other researchers will need to determine whether this is indeed the case. Nonetheless, I hope that a snapshot of the most frequent funding sources as represented by published journal articles will give researchers ideas for where to look for research funding. Lastly, I would like to thank Gene Trombini for overseeing the collection of this information and for his editorial assistance. I would like to thank Ryan Armstrong, Jerry Gioeni, Kamilah McShine, Jeanne Messerschmitt, and Noelle Whitney for their help in data collection.
Reference
Zickar, M. J., & Highhouse S. (2001). Measuring prestige of journals in industrial-organizational psychology. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 38(4), 29–36.