IMPROVING QUALITIY AND IMPACT OF PUBLICLY FUNDED ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN TÜRKİYE: THE CASE OF CHEMISTRY

Date

2024-9-06

Author

Hacıalioğlu, Salih

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Structure of research funding system has been changing over the past decades due to high demand for translating research results into economic and societal benefit. Institutional funding and project funding are two main allocation channels for universities and research institutions in today’s research policy and funding systems. Between them, project funding has been preferred channel by governments as an instrument to implement policy, therefore, the relevance and interest to improve efficiency and impact of project funding mechanism is one of the major concerns in research policy. Accordingly, this thesis is focused on improving quality and impact of project funding allocation channel in public research funding system. The scope of the thesis narrowed down to one funding instrument and one scientific field, Chemistry, as an example of being implemented in a middle-income country’s research system, in Turkish Research System. For this purpose, randomly selected 100 chemistry projects that were funded the most established public research funding program were investigated about 10 years after their completion. Findings were presented and discussed in both portfolio level and individual project level. Besides that, a scoring tool was developed to measure a composite outcome performance score for ranking projects in the portfolio. Proposed scoring tool can measure heterogeneous outcomes in a single composite score called “Project Performance Score” based on weights each output. To determine the weights of outputs and customizing it to chemistry field, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used. AHP survey results showed that even though their major field was chemistry, degree of importance of each output in PI’ perspective could be different based on their sub-fields. Problematic areas in the impact generating process were identified during the expert review and reasons behind those problems were investigated deeper by qualitative analysis methods. Findings were discussed based on the theories in the literature and solutions were proposed as policy recommendations. Establishing a stronger contractual relationship with researchers, financing and monitoring post-project activities and redesigning the program around thematic portfolios for enhancing collaborations were found to be most prominent policy implications for improving impact.

Subject Keywords

Public Research Funding, Research Quality, Impact Evaluation, Research Portfolio Analysis, AHP

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111372

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis