Characterizing researchers to study research funding agency impacts: The case of the European Research Council's Starting Grants

We describe the development and testing of a framework to characterize researchers individually (a profile) and in aggregate (as types) at the first stage, baseline step of a controlled, two-stage study of public research funding agency impacts. Our framework characterizes researcher attitudes and attributes, and conditions and opportunities experienced, addressing: 'demographic' factors; researcher 'approach'; and 'standing' (organizational career, knowledge community career, and local and national research environment aspects). This integrated demographic-approach-standing (DAS) framework is tested using a survey of 184 applicants to the inaugural, 2007 call for the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants (StG). Successful applicants are characterized to match-pair with a control group of quality-screened unsuccessful applicants. Given the inherent difficulty to identify in advance the 'frontier' researchers the ERC aims to fund with its StG, we characterize 'frontier-potential' factors that might lead researchers later to become regarded as frontier. We develop researcher types using several of our framework elements: researcher intellectual field mobility; novelty and risk-taking; independence; output productivity; and local research workplace standing. We find a variety of grantee types, but primarily not yet independent researchers whose 'standing' could be impacted upon by the early-career StG scheme. Lastly, we suggest impact pathways between types we could capture following a second stage survey, and discuss limitations to our framework including revising it to characterize better local research environment aspects.