Our Recent Productions

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1. Working Paper2026Open Access

   Opening the Black Box of Grant Peer Review: Exploratory Analysis of Linguistic and Sentiment Signals in Funding Outcomes(opens in a new tab)

   

   Bin, Adriana; Pinto, Daniela Maciel; Pereira, Cesar A. Guimarães; Cristofoletti, Evandro Coggo; Mena-Chalco, Jesus Paschoal; Salles Filho, Sérgio; Sugimoto, Cassidy R.

   Peer review plays a central role in research funding decisions, yet the evaluative language used in review reports remains insufficiently explored, particularly in funding agencies. This study examines how linguistic and sentiment characteristics of peer-review reports relate to funding outcomes at the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Brazil, focusing on the Regular Research Grant (RRG) and Young Investigator Grant (YIG) schemes between 2000 and 2017. Drawing on 19,333 proposals and their corresponding review reports, we analyze three aggregated corpora — overall reports, proposal-related reports, and applicant track-record reports — using natural language processing and sentiment analysis. We compare approved and rejected proposals across fields of knowledge, reviewer gender, applicant gender, and peer-review report sections. Results show that reviewers use distinct textual and sentiment patterns when justifying approval or rejection. These patterns vary according to the section evaluated — applicant track record or technical proposal — and also differ by field of knowledge and, more locally, by reviewer–applicant gender configurations. The pattern is more regular and stable in RRG than in YIG. Overall, the findings show how evaluative language illuminates fairness, consistency, and transparency in grant peer review.

   DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/ykca7_v1Exploratory analysisSentiment analysisPeer reviewExploratory researchLinguistic analysis
2. Working Paper2026Open Access

   Global research funding flows according to available grant data in Dimensions(opens in a new tab)

   

   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.

   DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/7de3f_v2MetadataEuropean commissionCommissionGrant funding
3. Working Paper2026Open Access

   Exploring the use of funding acknowledgments for mapping global research funding flows(opens in a new tab)

   

   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.

   DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/362zg_v1AmbiguityAttributionGrant funding