Transformative science: a new index and the impact of non-funding, private funding, and public funding

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and "generativity" (a novel measure defined as being highly cited and also leading to a comparatively large number of other highly cited work). Generativity is an attempt to provide a quantitative operationalization of transformativeness, a concept often used as a funding criterion despite not being a well-defined construct. This report identifies highly impactful and generative publications indexed in the subject area of psychology in the Web of Science in the year 2002. Publications that reported funding sources were found to be more generative than those that did not, and research that was privately funded was found to be more generative than publicly funded research. This analysis is exploratory, and hopefully contributes to a foundation for future empirical investigations into the structure and nature of transformative science that granting agencies would want to fund.