Effects of Research Funding, Gender and Type of Position on Research Collaboration Networks: A Micro-level Study of Cancer Research at Lund University

The aim of this study is to analyse the extent of which different types of research funding, gender and type of position have an effect on the size and density of research collaboration networks. The material consists of 3,306 documents by scientists doing cancer research at Lund University, indexed in the Web of Science databases. The author and address fields were analysed, by studying frequencies and distribution of authors and organizations, and by conducting co-authorship analyses on the organizational level. The results show substantial differences between scientists with funding from the Swedish Cancer Society (SCS) in comparison with those without SCS funding. When comparing men and women, as well as scientists with preclinical positions and those combining clinical and pre-clinical work; there are larger differences between e.g. women with or without SCS funding than between men and women with SCS funding. The general applicability of these results might be limited; they only take one certain kind of funding into account and they analyses are performed on documents coming out of one particular context. In this case, however, the results suggest that research funding have a larger impact on the size and nature of research collaboration networks than gender or type of position.