Testing Scientific Research Grant Funding Fairness

摘要

International granting agencies need to show that they award grants to the top researchers and avoid unwarranted regional or country-specific bias. This paper shows a method for testing regional or country-specific bias, even when the countries have greatly different numbers and percentages of top researchers and universities. A case study of the international research grants of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is used to illustrate the method, which shows that the Air Force Office of Scientific Research has favored, as expected, the higher ranked universities in all countries where it operates with only a slight positive bias for the countries in which it has offices.