University of Wisconsin and other research institutions alike may have been awarded millions or billions of dollars to fund essentially identical research projects, according to a Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University study.
Since 1985, federal agencies have funded up to $69 million in overlapping research funds to scientists who requested the same grant multiple times, the analysis by Virginia Tech’s Big Data computation at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute concluded.
Researchers from this study could not definitively confirm the grants were true duplicates because the full grant files are not publicly accessible, a Virginia Tech statement said. However, 167 out of more than 850,000 U.S. grant applications reviewed were deemed very similar, according to the report published in Nature, an interdisciplinary scientific journal.
“It is quite possible that our detection software missed many cases of duplication,” lead author of the study Harold Garner said in a Virginia Tech statement. “If text similarity software misses as many cases of funding duplications as it does plagiarism of scientific papers we’ve studied, then the extent of duplication could be much larger. It could be as much as 2.5 percent of total research funding, equivalent to $5.1 billion since 1985.”
Gardner, a professor of biological science and computer science at Virginia Tech, added 39 similar pairs of federal grant funding has been spent on similar pairs of research projects in the most recent five years – 2007 through 2011 – accounting for more than $20 million.
UW research spokesperson Terry Devitt said federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, review the university’s research grant proposals and determine whether research receives funding. He added academic institutions such as UW are not involved in the research proposal review process.
He said these determinations are based on recommendations by expert reviewers who conduct literature surveys to ensure government grants for such research are justified.
“Typically, if reviewers find the research is duplicated or not of high quality, it will not get funded,” Devitt said. “Also, it’s important to keep in mind that the process is such that scientific studies and experiments in particular are designed to be replicated.”
While duplicated research is presumably not an issue for UW, Devitt added, there is always the possibility research proposals that have already been funded receive funding again.
He emphasized the system of checks and balances among federal agencies to review grant proposals achieves its task of ensuring the research is new and addresses a novel question.
Devitt also noted it is “extremely difficult” for researchers to be successful in receiving funding for their proposals, with only between an eighth or a tenth of proposals being approved.
UW Vice Chancellor of Research and Dean of Graduate School Martin Cadwallader agreed wasteful funding for academic research is neither an issue at UW nor within the federal government. However, he noted he has not used Gardner’s software for detecting research duplication.
He said he was skeptical the 167 cases of overlapping research out of more than 800,000 proposals was legitimate.
“That seems like a remarkably small number to me given that sometimes duplication is actually valuable because you’ll find research is maybe to confirm previous results,” Cadwallader said. “In that case, I’m sure the abstract or the summary would seem pretty similar.”
