Dudek, Jonathan; Ni, Rong; van Honk, Jeroen; Ding, Gabrielle; Bovenzi, Nicandro; Durán-Silva, Nicolau; Ràfols, Ismael; Costas, Rodrigo
While most research funding is national, international funding plays a relatively important role, particularly for some regions of the Global South. However, the extent of funding flows between world regions remains unclear. This study represents a first attempt to map global research funding flows based on a set of grant metadata from Dimensions, augmented with data from the Gates Foundation and the European Commission (CORDIS). We find major regional gaps in the data outside of the leading scientific regions. With the data currently available, we find that Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa are the biggest recipients of inter-regional funding, with North America as main funder, and that over the last 25 years, total annual research funding has grown to above USD 60 billion, while inter-regional funding flows have stagnated at around USD 1.6 billion per year. These insights are contingent on data availability, raising the urgency for improving funding metadata infrastructures.