The author categorizes 127 funding programs (collected in 2018-19 and early 2022) using the budget structure of Horizon Europe, a program that didn’t even exist for most of the data collection period and was just launching during the final round.
You can’t analyze data from 2018 using a framework from 2021. The core taxonomy of the paper is anachronistic nonsense. This isn’t a minor slip; it completely invalidates the entire comparative analysis between the funding categories.
How did this get past anyone? Did you just force old data into new boxes to fit a pre-determined narrative? This seems like a fundamental failure of methodology that makes the paper’s conclusions worthless.