Methods for Synthesis of Funding Agency & Publisher Data.

Research analyzing the relationship between grants and publications as outcomes in has in the past been challenged by the general disconnect between information systems which track awards, and those which track published research. However, changing systems and data curation practices have created opportunities in which unified grant and publication data can help us to better understand the research lifecycle. More, specifically, the indexing of funding acknowledgements by bibliographic databases has become an established practice, and provides a means for programmatically building links to connect award records to publication data. This work illustrates the enrichment of grant award records from the U.S. National Science Foundation with direct links to publication data extracted from Web of Science. The usefulness of the bridged data is demonstrated through computation of acknowledgement lag, defined as the time elapsed between when a grant is awarded and when an article is published which acknowledges support from that grant. The application of a categorization schema furthermore shows that research disciplines are very different in terms of the lag time between awards and publications. Furthermore, the results found that in some cases, awards continued to be acknowledged by publications decades later.