On the citation relationship between industry funded and publicly funded Canadian Food Research publications
Creators: name: Kydra Mayhew
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: Our results illustrate that there is a higher incidence of supporting and contrasting citations given to industry publications. This finding is a leading indicator of how novelty and risk are both at play with industry funded research. Disagreement is not uncommon and is even desirable in research. Supported publications tend to be sufficiently novel in their ideas, resulting in other researchers supporting their ideas or even finding the same results. This is a common process in academic discourse, with researchers aiming for competing results with different methods and results as a means of publishing rivalrous discourse. Opposing positions and viewpoints in industrial findings further emphasize Tannen’s (2002) argument that “ritualized adversativeness” in academic research promotes disagreement and opposition through agonism. Nonetheless, critical citations, especially arising in aggregate from a group, can indicate that the group is engaging in riskier research because they are making more tentative statements that can be disputed. Novelty and risk seem to be more present in industrial work than publicly funded work, with the latter being more conservative in the citations it makes and receives. Our observations show that industrial work is more supported (and self-supported) and criticized (and self-criticized) than publicly funded research. This may be because often industrial research and publicly funded research on the same topics tend to have different research objectives, resulting in different outcomes. There are also significant risks and criticism that come with taking industry funding, as it can fuel tension and animosity from their peers regarding researcher's capabilities as well as their integrity as an academic. Industry funding functions as a double-edged sword for researchers – as Hottenrott and Thorwarth (2011) found that large amounts of funding from industry reduces research output for academics, but industry funded research is also more likely to improve both quality of research and patent citation impact. Industry funding is also an integral source for knowledge creation and sharing, as many industries are not only responsible for funding research, but also conferences, research labs and institutions, lectures, and journals. We should emphasize the importance of concentration of industry funding, and how it affects engagement and impact based on distribution. Partnerships with industries for research funding are not meant to fund all research – therefore it makes sense that industrial funding is concentrated in certain disciplines. Industrial distribution is often selective, with a general focus on the epistemic effects of funded research such as productivity, research potential, and ground-breaking innovation. Although these are the motives behind funding concentration, that does not necessarily mean that this will be the given outcome, as many heavily funded and well-established researchers have proven to have minimal positive research impacts. However, there is still a lot that is unknown when it comes to industrial research concentration and impact in the food science discipline. Future research could examine disagreement at the community level to understand how researchers in specific disciplines interact with industry funded research. In addition, the consolidation of novelty and risk in food science is an interesting finding that could be further pursued in other research areas that are heavily influenced by industrial research, such as gambling, medicine, and pharmacy. This research could provide valuable insight into whether criticism and support within groups are self-supported or self-criticized, or if they are indicative of dynamics within publicly funded and industrial research groups such as competition between labs or individual researchers. Based on our findings, further work may seek to better understand the citation behaviour between funded and non-funded research in food science. Can we observe citation differences in industry and publicly funded research on the same topics? Examination at this level could detect visible competition patterns from researchers with different types of institutional funding and help us to better understand potential topical preference biases based on industrial funding, and topics that are understudied due to lack of support and funding restraints