Research on research funding: an imperative for science and society

Abstract

Research in medicine and public health is essential for the future well-being of society. In sports medicine, research has, for example, shown that psychological, social and contextual factors all influence recovery processes after sport-related injuries.1 Such an understanding is central to optimise rehabilitation and improve outcomes and quality of life. Many members of the BJSM community are well versed in the research funding world. In research funding, peer review of grant applications is considered the best practice for deciding which projects or scholars are funded. There are, however, concerns about the validity of peer-review and research evaluation. A recent systematic review indicated that grant peer review in the health sciences suffers from biases, conservatism and is a weak predictor of future research performance.2 We acknowledge that maximising effectiveness and fairness of public research funding is challenging and in this editorial, we argue that research on research funding is required to reduce biases and conservatism and increase the efficiency of grant review. There are inherent weaknesses in grant review, which raise the question if it is the best method for allocating research funding. As funding organisations only recently have begun to investigate their review processes, most evidence on these challenges is anecdotal. Additionally, not much is known …

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