The degree of concentration in research funding has long been a principal matter of contention in science policy. Strong concentration has been seen as a tool for optimizing and focusing research investments but also as a damaging path towards hypercompetition, diminished diversity, and conservative topic selection. While several studies have documented funding concentration linked to individual funding organizations, few have looked at funding concentration from a systemic perspective. In this article, we examine nearly 20,000 competitive grants allocated by 15 major Danish research funders. Our results show a strongly skewed allocation of funding towards a small elite of individual researchers, and towards a select group of research areas and topics. We discuss potential drivers and highlight that funding concentration likely results from a complex interplay between funders’ overlapping priorities, excellence-dominated evaluation criteria, and lack of coordination between both public and private research funding bodies.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Danish university sector has been one of the most intensely reformed in Europe. In parallel, the staff composition of Danish Universities has also changed more than the corresponding compositions in other Western countries. But how direct is the link between the policy reforms and the staff changes? While we expect national policy reforms to have influence on organizational change in universities, we also know that the content and impact of policies are often shaped and modified by global trends as well as local path dependencies. To shed light on this question, this article examines the impact of four major reforms on the staff composition of Danish universities by interpreting long-term staff data at multiple levels. Contrary to the notions of change resistance and path dependency, the empirical analysis suggests that a consistent string of policy reforms has had a profound impact on the Danish universities. However, the analysis also shows that the links between national reforms and actual changes are seldom immediate and straightforward and that the local, national, and global levels interact. In doing so they often appear to reinforce the influence of each other.

The relationship between the distribution of research funding and scientific performance is a major discussion point in many science policy contexts. Do high shares of funding handed out to a limited number of elite scientists yield the most value for money, or is scientific progress better supported by allocating resources in smaller portions to more teams and individuals? In this review article, we seek to qualify discussions on the benefits and drawbacks of concentrating research funds on fewer individuals and groups. Based on an initial screening of 3,567 articles and a thorough examination of 92 papers, we present a condensation of central arguments. Further, we juxtapose key findings from 20 years of empirical research on the relation between the size of research grants and scientific performance. Overall, the review demonstrates a strong inclination toward arguments in favor of increased dispersal. A substantial body of empirical research also exhibits stagnant or diminishing returns to scale for the relationship between grant size and research performance. The findings question the rationale behind current funding trends and point toward more efficient ways to allocate resources. In addition, they highlight the need for more research on the interplay between science-internal mechanisms and policy priorities in accelerating concentration of funding.