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(Volume: 4, Issue: 3)
Is funding mandatory for pursuing research?
The researchers, who are at the start of the doctoral program, often has a dilemma on whether to opt for funding or not. So, what is funding in research? How does funding influence the researchers? How to choose funding as mandatory or not?
Let’s have a glimpse at it…
What is funding in research?
Funding is a financial assistance that a researcher can avail from government, industries, his/her own institution or any other research-promoting organizations, in order to conduct and complete his/her research in a financially-stable manner. Some common funding sources include industrial sponsorships, government fellowships, faculty grants and university scholarships.
How funding influences the researchers?
Generally, funding seems to aid the researchers. However, in a true essence, funding has both positive and negative impacts. Few of the positive impacts on the researchers include the following.
Access to expensive educational resources, laboratories, worldly datasets and experimental setups becomes possible with funding, as a researcher himself/herself might be unable to afford the big capital associated with them
The researchers’ might pre-plan and transform their goal of study to meet an urgent social need in a beneficial way. This is because most government or industry-based funded researches usually welcome research of societal impact
The researchers might publish their research articles in high impact factor journals, which usually charge heavier for open-access article processing. This in turn increases the visibility of their researcher’s findings to a large scientific community, promoting research integrity and career advancements
Reduces the financial stress of the researchers, which could otherwise result in ineffective research or incompletion of the doctoral degree
Despite the beneficial effects on the researchers, there are also some shortcomings associated with funding as follows:
The funded research does not always meet the researchers’ interest, as it prioritizes real-time research of urgent need or social impact than a researcher’s innovative theme that might take years to flourish. Thus, the researchers’ freedom of choosing a theme or an associated methodology might be limited by the funding requirements
The funded projects usually have a stipulated time for their completion. So, researchers might force themselves to complete their research with partial results, without completely achieving their aim
A non-timely completion of funded research might sometimes result in fund denial, forcing the researchers to self-refund their research. There is also a possibility that the researchers might be prone to legal or contractual consequences, when their research is government or industry-sponsored
How to choose funding?
Funding has both positive and negative consequences on the researchers and their research. Hence, it is the researcher’s choice to opt funding as a mandatory requirement or not for pursuing his/ her research. In fact, the researchers should self-analyse the following queries before opting for funding.
Do I have enough fund to carry out my research?
Am I ready to work with the research notion of the funding agency or wanted to work independently in an innovative way?
Does my research theme or methodology gets altered by the funding requirements? If yes, does it improve or deteriorate my research interest?
Can I complete the research within the period imposed by the funding agencies?
Am I in need of a fund to publish my article open access?
Does funding enable my research findings to reach the related scientific audience, encourage academic excellence or provide career advancements?
Hence, The Research Seer’s Rationale on “Is funding mandatory for pursuing research?” is:
“Receive funding, when research exploration requires financial assistance”
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