I already explained at the beginning of this article, that we have to differ between the 'Network-GDN' and the 'organizational-GDN' doing, or at least granting research itself. After examining the structure of the Knowledgebase, the network-part of the GDN, we want to put emphasize on research GDN is doing, or at least granting.
During my study on the quality of GDN-financed research, I came across an article written by Prof. William Easterly and Laura Freschi at aidwatchers.com. In 'A $3 million book with 8 readers? The impact of donor-driven research' they explain that GDN is a good example for the low efficiency of donor-driven research (or more general: aid). They support their argument with research done by aidwatchers.com: aidwatchers found out that publications produced during some 'Global Research Projects' got, according to google scholar, very few citations, although equipped with a million dollar budget. I took this insight as basis for further researches.
Actually there are two lists of GDN-publications: one presenting articles and books published by the GDN itself and one presenting articles which emerged during GDN-funded projects or were honoured by a Medal. This research is based upon the later.
I wrote a script which automatically fetched title, authors and publishing date of the articles and searched for them in google scholar and scopus. There are 339 papers at the moment, of which the script found 178 in scholar. According to google 120 of them have been cited so far. 6 papers have been cited more than 100 times, 22 more than 20 times. 14 articles could be found in scopus, 10 of them have been cited so far, two more than 20 times (27 and 31). Compared to other academic articles this output is not very high (Prof. Easterlys article 'Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions' for example, has been cited 2503 times - according to scholar), nevertheless it is more than aidwatchers.com found when tracing the 'Global Research Projects'. I think this is due to the fact, that the books and articles published by the GDN itself, including the 'book with 8 readers', (the first list) have been cited considerably less often than articles gone out of GDN-Projects, but published somewhere else (the second list).
Although it takes some time for articles to be recognized (and cited) by the scientific community, I produced a timeline of GDN-articles:
Impact of GDN-papers
Click to enlarge: Figure 6
Source: M. Schlögl
As mentioned before scientific articles need some time to get cited and therefore we have to be careful with this statistic. Nevertheless the average citations per paper shrink significantly since 1999, while the total number of papers rises.
My script found 47 Papers that have been cited more often, than the '$3 million book with 8 readers' Prof. Easterly and Laura Freschi wrote their article about. Still, the average of citations is going down and about the half of all papers could not even be found in google scholar (scopus found only a little bit more than 4% of the papers). Up to now these evidences suggest that GDN-papers do not have a very high impact on the scientific discourse. As scopus features only high quality scientific journals we can presume that only very view GDN-articles make their way into these journals. Still we have to keep in mind, that this research traced only articles mentioned at gdnet.org. If it is not in the database, it is not in the research results.
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