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As Nature Index coverage has highlighted, Australia has struggled to maintain its research performance, dropping out of the top 10 nations in the latest Research Leaders ranking this year.
A factor blamed for this slip in performance is a fall in overall research and development funding, which as a percentage of GDP dropped from 2.25% in 2009 to 1.68% in 2022, its lowest level in 20 years. But what do the more detailed data say about funding for research conducted in Australia over the past decade?
According to data on research grants, extracted by the Nature Research Intelligence team from the Digital Science Dimensions database, there have been some notable trends in the sources of funding, and the recipients of grants.
The figures show that, for grants starting in 2015 to 2024, the two biggest funders were the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Across the period, the NHMRC funded grants worth US$7.2 billion, while the ARC’s total was about US$6.3 billion.
This might not be a surprise, seeing as these two agencies are the main medical and non-medical research funders in Australia. Data from Nature Navigator show that funding from both the NHMRC and ARC is associated with thousands of research publications each year.
However, the funding figures suggest that the NHMRC’s funding has been falling in the past few years, while the ARC’s has been rising. In 2020, for instance, the NHMRC funded around US$320 million in grants, but this figure fell by more than half to US$134 million by 2023. During the same period, the ARC’s funding rose by more than a quarter from around US$450 million in 2020 to around US$570 million in 2023.
At the same time, there have been noticeable variations in funding by research area. For instance, biomedical and clinical sciences is by far the largest field of research for grants received by value, representing more than US$9 billion from 2015 to 2024, and almost 12,000 grants. But after funding for the field rose rapidly from 2015 to 2018, it has since plateaued, while other areas such as health sciences, engineering and human society have recorded consistent gains.
In the health area specifically, cancer research received the most funding from 2015 to 2024, at US$2.4 billion, followed by infection research (US$2.2 billion) and neurological research (US$1.5 billion).
It is not just national funding institutions where the trends are notable. The fourth most important funder by total grant value from 2015 to 2024, after Australia’s Medical Research Future Fund in third, was the European Commission, representing about US$2.1 billion in funding. In recent years, its contribution to Australian research has been growing, from about US$150 million in 2020 to almost US$220 million in 2024.
In 2023, the Australian government decided not to continue with talks to join the European Union’s (EU’s) Horizon Europe funding programme as an associate country. This status, which is held by New Zealand and the United Kingdom, allows researchers in countries outside the EU to apply for Horizon funding and lead projects. Researchers from Australia can still receive funding from Horizon in certain circumstances and the data suggest it has been of growing importance, but association might have taken this funding to a much higher level.
The EU is not the only large source of funding for Australian research based outside the country. Some of the United Kingdom’s major research funders, such as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council, appear in the top 10, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a major non-profit funder. But in all three of these cases, funding appears to have been on the slide since 2020.
The data also suggest that following a peak around the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the leading recipients of grants for Australian research have seen a slight drop-off in the total amount of funding.
Across the whole timeframe of the extracted data, the University of Melbourne received the most funding, with a total of about US$3.8 billion, followed by UNSW Sydney (US$3.2 billion), Monash University, in Melbourne (US$3.1 billion) and the University of Queensland in Brisbane (US$2.9 billion). Annual funding received by Melbourne, UNSW Sydney and Monash fell from 2021 to 2023, however, while the University of Queensland’s rose. In the latest Nature Index tables for leading Australian institutions in the database, the University of Queensland was top.
One caveat to be aware of with the data, however, is that grants awarded to projects involving multiple universities are not divided up between those institutions in the figures. So, if a university is often involved in projects with several institutional collaborations, their funding data might appear larger than the true amount received. In addition, Dimensions might not hold funding data from every source of grants accessed by Australian research.
