Using acknowledgement data to characterize funding organizations by the types of research sponsored: the case of robotics research

Funded research has been linked to academic production and performance. While the presence of funding acknowledgements may serve as an indicator of quality to some extent, we still lack tools to evaluate whether funding agencies allocate resources to novel and innovative research rather than mature fields. We address this issue in the present study by using bibliometrics. In particular, we exploit the citation network properties of academic...