TY - JOUR
T1 - How does national scientific funding support emerging interdisciplinary research
T2 - A comparison study of big data research in the US and China
AU - Huang, Ying
AU - Zhang, Yi
AU - Youtie, Jan
AU - Porter, Alan L.
AU - Wang, Xuefeng
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Huang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2016/5
Y1 - 2016/5
N2 - How do funding agencies ramp-up their capabilities to support research in a rapidly emerging area? This paper addresses this question through a comparison of research proposals awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in the field of Big Data. Big data is characterized by its size and difficulties in capturing, curating, managing and processing it in reasonable periods of time. Although Big Data has its legacy in longstanding information technology research, the field grew very rapidly over a short period. We find that the extent of interdisciplinarity is a key aspect in how these funding agencies address the rise of Big Data. Our results show that both agencies have been able to marshal funding to support Big Data research in multiple areas, but the NSF relies to a greater extent on multi-program funding from different fields. We discuss how these interdisciplinary approaches reflect the research hot-spots and innovation pathways in these two countries.
AB - How do funding agencies ramp-up their capabilities to support research in a rapidly emerging area? This paper addresses this question through a comparison of research proposals awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in the field of Big Data. Big data is characterized by its size and difficulties in capturing, curating, managing and processing it in reasonable periods of time. Although Big Data has its legacy in longstanding information technology research, the field grew very rapidly over a short period. We find that the extent of interdisciplinarity is a key aspect in how these funding agencies address the rise of Big Data. Our results show that both agencies have been able to marshal funding to support Big Data research in multiple areas, but the NSF relies to a greater extent on multi-program funding from different fields. We discuss how these interdisciplinary approaches reflect the research hot-spots and innovation pathways in these two countries.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84971422933&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0154509
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0154509
M3 - Article
C2 - 27219466
AN - SCOPUS:84971422933
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 11
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 5
M1 - e0154509
ER -