Ni, Rong; van Honk, Jeroen; Dudek, Jonathan; Ding, Gabrielle; Ràfols, Ismael; Costas, Rodrigo
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.