Interesting research alert! 🚨 Ever wondered if your academic institution's ranking affects how you write grant proposals? A study reveals that in #China, lower-status applicants create longer titles to compensate for perceived biases!
📚✍️ https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvae039
Lower-status applicants tend to use more words in their grant titles, especially when applying for larger grants or in more competitive fields like Business Administration. 📊
Funding bias is a real thing. Per the Wiki it is "the tendency of a scientific study to support the interests of the study's financial sponsor." This refers to direct funders, but in academia at least it's just as applicable to indirect funders. It's as applicable to social sciences and the humanities as it is to disciplines housed in the science building.
Academic researchers rely on the existence of a vast web of legal and economic factors which make the very existence of the academy possible. Tax laws subsidizing nonprofits, police violence for maintaining a supply of subordinate labor and the real estate market, government force to underwrite student loans, the financial industry to fund and issue the loans, and the violent nature of capitalist labor control to create enough people willing to take the loans.
The list goes on and on. Without all this ultimately financial support not only would there be no academic research, there'd be no academy. Of course this creates bias. People are right to mistrust climatological research funded by oil companies or cancer research funded by chemical companies, but ought to extend the same critical attitude towards *all* academic research, even research with explicitly liberatory goals. It's not all wrong, it's not all an op, it's not all ultimately serving the interests of our capitalist masters, but a lot more of it is than one would think just from looking at the source of the direct funding.
Serhii Nazarovets
Adrian Riskin 