Do large grants forward scientific progress?

This recent paper by Jean-Michel Fortin and David J. Currie in Plos ONE argues that funding does have a positive impact on scientific productivity and impact, as measured by productivity in terms of publications, and as measured by citations to papers funded by grants. However, surprisingly, the correlation is quite weak, and large grants had a lower impact per dollar than small grants. From the abstract

Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than "excellence", are likely to prove to be more productive.

In other words, funding more researchers with a smaller budget may be more conducive to scientific progress than funding only the most "excellent" researchers. Indeed, in an earlier blog post I suggested that it might increase productivity even further if grants were dealt out at random, or distributed evenly among those who request them. At least then, researchers wouldn't spend disproportionate amounts of time writing grant applications.

Unfortunately, as the authors note, the model in grant-making, both through national funding agencies and private, philanthropic organizations, is veering towards large grants that reward mainly "excellence", which also creates a Matthew effect, whereby a researcher's or lab's success in obtaining past grants is one of the measures used in deciding whether or not to award a grant.