Evaluation of Japanese universities' research activity based on the number of awards of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from 1998 to 2002 and in 2003

Abstract

The system of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) is one of the oldest funding systems for researchers belonging to universities and institutes in Japan. The fund is allotted to researchers by peer review of their applications for research projects. The total number of subjects of Grantsin-Aid for Scientific Research allotted to the individual research fields from fiscal years (FY) 1998 to 2002 were tallied for each university and institute. The purpose of this report is to rank funded subjects as an index of the research activities of each university and institute. Furthermore, using the database for FY 2003, for which the ministry undertook a large revision to the classification of academic fields, we show the relationship between the situations before and after the classification changes. We indicate whether the last revision has caused significant shifts in the allocation of funds. This paper contains information abstracted from six series of NII Technical Reports from FY 1998 to 2002 and five series for FY 2003.