Evans looked at over 18,000 research articles involving Arabidopsis, mapping out which articles are linked together by common research themes, methods, or citations......
The results show that government-funded studies tended to cluster around related themes and theoretical hubs. Industry-funded work on the other hand tended to stray more from hubs and explore novel gene combinations, use new techniques, or investigate previously unexplored biological processes. “For the network of scientific ideas surrounding Arabidopsis, industry sponsorship weaves discoveries around the periphery into looser, more expansive knowledge,” Evans writes. In short, industry pushes scientists “to know less about more.”.....
“Governments reward replication; companies enable novelty. Governments sponsor refinements in the thick of existing hubs of scientific activity; industry patronizes pioneering activity into unknown, sometimes desolate, scientific territory.”
There is the obvious point that companies keep secrets when it is helpful to their business to do so. There is also the question of what would have happened had industry not increased funding for research on Arabidopsis. Have the best researchers been diverted to less important research than they would have undertaken with peer reviewed funding priorities? Note too that there is a considerable spill over from research on one plant system to other plant systems. That indeed is the very reason that so much research is done on Arabidopsis, a plant with little if any economic value.
An alternative approach to bibliometrics might show that researchers were drawn away from basic research needed to understand the very complicated biology of plants in order to do more remunerative but less scientifically valuable crop development research.
Still, the article is clearly interesting.
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