Funding acknowledgments (FAs) provide a potential but underexplored source for mapping global research funding flows. This study develops a framework for constructing global funding flow measures using FA data from Dimensions and assesses both the opportunities and limitations of this approach. We compare total and inter-regional funding flows based on funding grant information available in FAs of scientific publications. Our analysis identifies a key limitation arising from collaborative publications, where funding is attributed at the publication level rather than to individual authors. This obscures the interpretation of cross-border funding flows. We show that this attribution structure introduces systematic ambiguity and limits the validity of FA-based analyses. We argue that disaggregated, author-level funding attribution is essential for accurately tracing funding flows. This requires coordinated action among funders, publishers, and researchers, as well as the adoption of more standardized, machine-readable FAs formats.
This is a position paper (still as a work-in-progress) with the main insights of the project "Tracking Research Funding Flows in the Global South" funded by IDRC and presented in the Wellcome Trust in the workshop 'Mapping research funding flows for global alignment and impact' on 23rd of April 2026. The full list of contributors to the project is included in the document. A long and a short presentation of this position paper are also attached as powerpoint files. A recording of the long presentation in the centre CENIT of the Universidad San Martín de Buenos Aires, in Spanish, is available here.
area, CWTS Engagement & Inclusion focal; de Bordes, Carole; Costas, Rodrigo; Holtrop, Tjitske; Traag, Vincent
This document outlines the strategic plan for the Engagement & Inclusion focal area at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University for the period 2026–2028, presenting the focal area’s vision, long-term strategic impacts, and operational objectives developed through collaborative discussions among members and coordinators.
Since their appearance in the 1980s, global maps of science have proved useful to locate the relative position of topics and organisations in large scientific landscapes, providing strategic information for portfolio analyses in science policy. At this global level (global meaning here ‘all disciplines’), these maps have been based on publications and have mostly used citations to build the relationship between scientific fields. Here, we present a comprehensive scientific map based on grant data that uses semantic analyses (BERT-based topic modelling) to provide the overall landscape of science based on grant data from the European Union since 2003 (since the 6th framework programme). We find a disciplinary structure which is consistent with the circular shape of publication and citation based global science maps. However, this grant map shows a much larger presence of applied science and mission-oriented research, such as engineering and sustainability sciences. We provide examples of how this landscape can be used as a baseline to explore the specialisation of territories (regions), organisations (universities) and funding programmes.
Arroyo‐Machado, Wenceslao; Ràfols, Ismael; Díaz‐Faes, Adrián A.
Funded by Agencia Estatal de Investigación, European Commission
Background A central concern in global health priority-setting is whether the supply of scientific knowledge aligns with health needs and demands. This alignment is usually assessed by comparing research effort with disease burden, overlooking other type of “social demand” of disease, in particular whether diseases are socially visible and generate public attention. We develop an analytical framework that treats public attention and epidemiological burden as complementary dimensions of health demand and examines their alignment with knowledge supply. Methods We combine data on publications indexed in OpenAlex, disability-adjusted life years from the Global Burden of Disease, and Wikipedia pageviews for 2016 to 2023, as indicators of research effort, disease burden, and public attention, respectively. We map 19 disease groups and 138 specific diseases across these three dimensions. Ternary plots are used to position diseases according to their relative balance across dimensions and to identify diseases that are over- or under-represented in research effort relative to epidemiological burden and public attention. We compare Global North-South patterns using German, Persian, Swahili, and Vietnamese language areas to assess how these relationships vary across territories. Results The three dimensions show limited alignment. At the disease group level, cardiovascular diseases account for the largest share of disease burden, mental disorders attract the largest share of public attention, and neoplasms concentrate the largest share of research effort. Public attention and disease burden are weakly correlated at both group and specific disease levels, indicating that Wikipedia pageviews and DALYs capture distinct dimensions of health demand. Ternary plots reveal different forms of misalignment, with some diseases showing plots dominated by burden, others by research effort, and others by public attention. Territorial analyses add a further layer by showing that diseases follow disparate patterns of supply-demand (mis)alignment across different linguistic territories. Conclusions Public attention provides a complementary dimension for mapping global health needs and demands. Our approach identifies where scientific knowledge supply fails to match epidemiological and/or public attention, supporting more nuanced global health analysis that may be useful for priority-setting.
Gimenez, Ana Maria Nunes; Carneiro, Ana Maria; Bezerra, Luiza Maria Capanema; Fredo, Carlos Eduardo; Ferreira, Carolina Mendes B.; Lopes, Larissa Aparecida Prevato
Funded by FAPESP
Given the growing strategic importance of international mobility for funding agencies and higher education institutions, this study presents a mapping review of scientific articles published from 2013 to 2022 and indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Its aim is to identify the predominant themes, the geographical and temporal patterns of knowledge production in this field, the methodologies employed, and the main research gaps. The analysis involved a careful selection of articles, followed by an examination of abstracts and full texts, thematic categorization, and data interpretation. The results show that, despite the hegemony of Global North countries as centers of knowledge production and as preferred destinations for international mobility, new actors—namely China, India, Singapore, and South Korea—have been reshaping the global landscape. Nevertheless, there remains limited research on gender and racial inequalities, pointing to gaps that may inform future studies.
Rafols, Ismael; Costas, Rodrigo; Bezuidenhout, Louise; Brasil, André
For science and technology to contribute to social justice, scientometrics analyses need to be able to produce descriptions that are appropriate to specific contexts and values. Given that the participation of stakeholders in the analyses is crucial for these perspectives to be realized, this requires research information analyses that are “open”. In this paper, we propose that this “openness” in research information concerns several dimensions. In the first place, research information should be open in the sense of being transparent and accessible. Second, research information should be open in the sense of being inclusive and diverse, which includes two dimensions: that stakeholders can actually use it, and that the contents include different types of knowledge. Third, the research information should be provided in forms that empower interrogation by stakeholders, so that they can retrieve and construct the descriptions of science and technology that are more appropriate for their context. This last step implies efforts to make visible many scientific contributions from the global south which are currently invisible. We call this vision “the multiversatory”: an approach to the observation of science that facilitates pluralistic analyses of the knowledge created across a variety of places and contexts, the pluriverse.
Numerous initiatives are currently underway to disambiguate databases worldwide. In this paper, we propose a methodology for disambiguating research entities using big data techniques, adopting an approach that goes from local to global databases. Our objective is to enhance the quality of data in the OpenAlex database by leveraging information from Brazilian databases, particularly data from the Lattes Platform and the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education. We compare similar names of authors and institutions, employing Digital Object Identifiers to link entities, along with an adaptation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm. The proposed method is straightforward to implement in tabular databases and facilitates disambiguation, thereby contributing to open science practices and providing an effective solution for research information systems. The findings indicate the potential for integrating local and global databases to address issues related to ambiguous names and incomplete metadata.
