Fig. 4: Comparing long-term funding performance between cross-council and within-council investigators.

a An illustrative example of comparison in terms of long-term funding performance of cross-council (orange) and within-council (blue) principal investigators (PIs) with similar funding profiles. Both PIs obtained 2 research grants during the in-sample period from 2006 to 2010, but the within-council PI received grants from the same research council (both from Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)), while the cross-council PI received grants from 2 different councils (one from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and the other from Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)). For the in-sample period 2006–2010, we pair the PIs with similar career profiles, while for the out-of-sample period 2011–2018, we compare the funding performance of each paired PIs. b Matching the cross-council and within-council PIs with similar career profiles in terms of both funding performance and research outcomes during the in-sample period. We match 8 different factors for PIs between 2006 and 2010 as follows: institutional ranking of a given PI (whereby institutions are ranked by their total amount of funding between 2006 and 2018), the number of grants a given PI has received, their average grant value, average team size, average project duration, average number of publications reported, average number of total citations received per grant (calculated as the average of the total citations received by papers associated with a grant), and the average number of citations received per paper per grant (calculated first as the average of the citations received by papers associated with a grant, and then averaged over the total number of grants awarded to a PI). Citations are considered within 5 years after publication, and have been normalized by the average citations of all papers belonging to the same year and discipline in Microsoft Academic Graph dataset. There is no statistically significant difference between the two groups of PIs across the eight factors following the pairing. The shaded areas represent the 95% confidence interval. c Difference in long-term funding performance between cross-council and within-council PIs in the following eight years (2011 to 2018). Cross-council PIs outperform within-council PIs in grant volume, value and team size. The significance levels shown refer to t-tests and Kruskal-Wallis tests. ***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean.