Paper Short Abstract

This study examines whether ERC-funded researchers produce more novel contributions than unfunded but equally excellent applicants. Using novelty indicators, we find ERC funding does not enhance novelty, as funded researchers rely on established knowledge over unconventional ideas.

Paper Abstract

The European Research Council (ERC) funds frontier research with the goal of driving groundbreaking scientific advancements. Although ERC grants are designed to support high-risk, high-reward research, traditional bibliometric indicators—such as short-term citation counts or journal impact factors—often fail to capture novelty. As a result, how ERC funding promotes novel scientific contributions remains an open question. This study evaluates whether ERC-funded researchers produce more novel scientific contributions compared to similarly excellent, but unfunded, applicants. Using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach with multiple time periods, we analyze ERC applicant data (2014–2020) from CORDA, matched with bibliometric data from OpenAlex and SciSciNet. We measure novelty through Foster’s Novelty metric, Atypical Combinations analysis, and Sleeping Beauty coefficients, capturing unconventional knowledge recombinations and delayed recognition effects. Our results indicate that ERC funding does not significantly increase the novelty of researchers' output compared to their unfunded counterparts. While ERC-funded scientists maintain high research productivity, their work tends to rely on established knowledge structures rather than pioneering unconventional combinations. Notably, the most novel outputs, as measured by Foster’s Novelty and Atypical Combinations, do not exhibit a systematic advantage for ERC-funded researchers. Additionally, Sleeping Beauty analyses reveal that breakthrough research often emerges independently of ERC support, suggesting that the grant’s selection process may favor safer, incremental advances over high-risk, disruptive ideas. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the role of competitive funding in fostering truly groundbreaking science and call for a reassessment of evaluation criteria to better support scientific novelty.