Factors affecting government-funded research quality

As the number of research grants distributed to academic research in science has been continuously increasing, it is necessary to examine various factors that affect research quality. While there have been a large number of studies on factors that affect research productivity or performance, their empirical results have been quite inconclusive and conflicting. We argue that one of the reasons for mixed results involves the measurement of research performance. To tackle the problem, we measure the quality of government-funded research through journal impact factors as well as journal rankings, considering the specific features of academic disciplines. We find that the magnitude and degree of factors vary depending on how research quality is measured. More interestingly, several variables including researchers’ ages, the number of authors, and international collaboration show completely different results according to the level of journal ranking. Based on the empirical results, we suggest policy interventions that can improve the quality of government-supported research.