Vol.:(0123456789) Scientometrics (2021) 126:7859–7874 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04077-9 1 3 What is the relationship between research funding and citation‑based performance? A comparative analysis between critical disciplines Saeed Roshani 1  · Mohammad‑Reza Bagherylooieh 1  · Melika Mosleh 2  · Mario Coccia 3 Received: 16 December 2020 / Accepted: 9 June 2021 / Published online: 24 June 2021 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2021 Abstract The goal of the study here is to model and analyze the relation between research funding and citation-based performance in science to predict the difusion of new scientifc results in society. In fact, an important problem in the feld of scientometrics is to explain factors determining the growth of citations in documents that can increase the difusion of scien- tifc results and the impact of science on society. The study here confronts this problem by developing a scientometric analysis to clarify, whenever possible, the relation between research funding and citations of articles in critical disciplines. Data of 2015 retrieved from the Web of Science database relating to the three critical disciplines given by computer science, medicine and economics are analyzed. Results suggest that computer science jour- nals published more funded than unfunded papers. Medicine journals published equally funded and unfunded documents, and fnally economics journals published more unfunded than funded papers. In addition, funded documents received more citations than unfunded papers in all three disciplines under study. The study also fnds that citations in funded, unfunded and total (funded + unfunded) papers follow a power-law distribution in diferent disciplines. Another novel fnding is that for all disciplines under study, the Matthew efect is greater for funded articles compared to unfunded documents. The results here can sup- port best practices of research policy directed to fund vital scientifc research for increasing the difusion of science and scientifc fndings in society. Keywords Research funding · Science creation · Science difusion · Citations · Scientifc development · Papers · Power-law distribution · Matthew efect Introduction Many studies have attempted to explore the impacts of diferent variables on research out- puts (Rousseau, 2000; Van Raan, 1998). Some researches focus on the relationship between scientifc collaboration and research impact (cf., Coccia & Bozeman, 2016; Ronda-Pupo * Saeed Roshani Roshani@atu.ac.ir Extended author information available on the last page of the article