Geographical equity between outputs of biomedical research grants and research capability as an indicator of the peer-review process for grant applications

A function of the known citation impact factor of journals in which papers are published is likely to affect funding decisions by committees of award. A comparison of the goodness of fit between the geographical distributions within a country of the ‘inputs’ to the funding decision and the ‘outputs’, as revealed by the locations of later papers that acknowledge the support of the funding body, can reveal the form of this function. Hence it can describe the decision-making process of a funder -‘egalitarian’, valuing all papers the same, or ‘elitist’, giving much more weight to papers in highly cited journals. The analysis has been applied to two sets of UK papers, in cancer research and cardiology, and yields realistic and consistent results for this function for several different funding bodies. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.