Multidimensional bibliometric assessment of science funding effectiveness

Science funding supports discovery, innovation, and societal progress by enabling research aligned with social needs, but its effectiveness is hard to assess due to the lack of counterfactuals, overlapping funding sources, and varied evaluation metrics. To address this, we developed a multidimensional framework that encompasses research impact, international collaboration, open access status, thematic orientation, and interdisciplinarity, and used it to compare publications funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) across fifteen natural science fields between 2011 and 2020. Our analysis shows that NSFC support more effectively captures highly cited outputs, whereas NSF funding is more efficient at identifying high impact work and more consistently promotes international partnerships. Both funders have driven substantial growth in open access publishing even though the rising article processing charges threaten equity. In terms of thematic focus, NSFC concentrates on popular research areas while NSF tends to support niche but influential fields. Finally, funded publications consistently demonstrate superior interdisciplinary integration compared to unfunded publications before 2018, indicative of a systemic inclination within financially backed research endeavors to synthesize heterogeneous academic domains for enhanced innovative output. Funded publications outperform unfunded publications both on dimensions of variety and disparity, yet reverses on balance. These findings demonstrate that national funding schemes exert heterogeneous effects on research dynamics, suggesting that future policy should mandate incentives for collaboration and open access, diversify thematic portfolios, and prioritize genuine interdisciplinary innovation.