Abstract—Every year, a considerable amount of money is being invested on research, mainly in the form of funding allocated to universities and research institutes. To better distribute the available funds and to set the most proper R&D investment strategies for the future, evaluation of the productivity of the funded researchers and the impact of such funding is crucial. In this paper, using the data on 15 years of journal publications of the NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering research Council of Canada) funded researchers and by means of bibliometric analysis, the scientific development of the funded researchers and their scientific collaboration patterns will be investigated in the period of 1996-2010. According to the results it seems that there is a positive relation between the average level of funding and quantity and quality of the scientific output. In addition, whenever funding allocated to the researchers has increased, the number of co-authors per paper has also augmented. Hence, the increase in the level of funding may enable researchers to get involved in larger projects and/or scientific teams and increase their scientific output respectively. Keywords—Bibliometrics, Collaboration, Funding, Productivity. I. INTRODUCTION CIENTIFIC activities and size and quality of the R&D sector play a key role in determining the world-wide position of a country. Many articles has acknowledged funding as the main determinant of research productivity (e.g. [1]-[3]) and the level of research funding has been indicated as the most crucial factor for improving the research productivity. Although the approach towards the allocation of the research funding varies across the countries and different procedures are being followed worldwide for this purpose, governments are annually investing considerable amounts of money on R&D in a hope for a higher scientific development of the funded researchers. It is easy to judge the productivity and the impact of the research of the Nobel laureates or star (highly productive) scientists. However, for the rest of scientists one should have quantitative indicators in order to analyze and compare the scientific productivity of the researchers [4]. Publications are usually considered as the main output of the scientific activities (e.g. [5], [6]). They are also viewed as the principal measure of academic recognition in most of the western Ashkan Ebadi is with the Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 2W1 Canada (corresponding author, phone: 514 848-2424 #5069; e-mail: a_ebad@ encs.concordia.ca). Andrea Schiffauerova is with the Department of Engineering Systems and Management, Masdar Institute, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. She is also with the Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 2W1 Canada (e-mail: andrea@encs.concordia.ca). countries [7]. It is claimed that a limited number of journal papers are currently publishing the main output of the scientific research [6]. In addition, a small number of scientists are publishing most of the scientific papers and the weights of publications are not divided evenly [8]. This is known as the Lotka’s law in the literature [9], introduced by Lotka in 1926. Governments have funded researches for more than sixty years [10] and have employed various tools and techniques, both quantitative and qualitative, to measure their scientific performance [11]. Having such a history, the impact of funding on the scientific output has been investigated in the literature from various perspectives. A few studies assessed the impact of funding on the productivity of the medical schools or programs (e.g. [3], [12] and [13]). A number of studies focused on the effect of contractual funding on the quantity and quality of the scientific publications (e.g. [14], [15]). Using statistical analysis, various studies investigated the impact of federal funding (e.g. [16], [17]), industry finding (e.g. [18]), or private funding (e.g. [19]) on scientific productivity and research performance. In addition, a few studies focused on the scientific productivity at the countries level and assessed the impact of national investments (e.g. [20], [21]). Evaluating the impact of funding has also attracted the attention of the Canadian researchers. In Canada, scientific articles have been recognized as the main output of researchers and universities [22] and bibliometrics has been mostly used for scientific evaluation purposes [23]. In a report to the Program Evaluation Committee of NSERC discussed the feasibility of bibliometric evaluation of the funded research. Godin [22] in a bibliometric evaluation studied the impact of NSERC funding on the productivity and papers’ quality of the supported researchers for the period of 1990- 1999. He used Science Citation Index (SCI) database and analyzed the number of papers written by funded researchers over a 10-year time period to find NSERC proportion amount of contribution to the scientific development of Canada. In a series of studies, Campbell and his colleagues performed bibliometric evaluations on the impact of funding on scientific performance [24]-[26]. In two recent studies, [27], [19] used regression analysis to study the impact of public and private funding on the scientific production of the Canadian academics working in biotechnology and nanotechnology fields respectively. Despite using different methodologies to assess the impact of funding (e.g. bibliometrics, statistical analysis), most of the studies in the literature have found a positive relation between funding and the rate of the publications regardless of intensity Bibliometric Analysis of the Impact of Funding on Scientific Development of Researchers Ashkan Ebadi, Andrea Schiffauerova S World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Computer and Information Engineering Vol:9, No:5, 2015 1541 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 9(5) 2015 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/10001356 International Science Index, Computer and Information Engineering Vol:9, No:5, 2015 waset.org/Publication/10001356