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Funding for leading research projects around the globe is more likely to be falling than increasing, according to a survey of thousands of researchers who have published some of the most influential science in the past few years.
The Research Leaders survey polled more than 6,000 authors of articles published in journals tracked by Nature Index journals since 2020. It found that 53% think funding for leading projects in their field is decreasing; by contrast, 21% say it is rising.
In all regions, more respondents thought funding was decreasing than increasing, but the view in North America was particularly bleak: 69% of researchers there said funding was decreasing. By contrast, 40% of respondents in Asia and Oceania reported declining funding, compared with one-third who said it was on the up. Around half of respondents in Europe and Africa and South America said funding was falling.
Nature Index 2025 Research Leaders
Simon Marginson, a higher-education researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, says it is not surprising that researchers in North America are pessimistic, given the US funding cuts implemented since President Donald Trump returned to office last year.
Last March, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, announced that it was cutting grants deemed ‘unaligned’ with agency priorities, amounting to some US$1.8 billion in funding. In September, a judge allowed the administration to cancel more than 1,600 grants issued by the National Science Foundation (NSF), worth more than $1 billion. In May, Trump proposed a 57% reduction for the NSF’s budget, to $3.9 billion, and a 41% cut for the NIH, to $27.9 billion, although the US Congress is working to pass bills that would avoid the bulk of these cuts.
Regional split
Marginson says the optimism of researchers in Asia is consistent with longer-term patterns in research investment.
“China is a big driver — in aggregate terms — of any trend. But Singapore, Malaysia, [South] Korea and even Vietnam are all increasing their funding in science. And Japan is reinvesting in science after university budgets were left to wither for decades” because public investment did not keep up with rising costs. Singapore, for example, has committed 37 billion Singapore dollars (US$29 billion) to its Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 plan — equivalent to around 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) — representing a $9-billion-Singapore-dollar increase on the previous five-year funding cycle. South Korea, meanwhile, spent 5.3% of its GDP in 2023 on research and development (R&D), making it one of the largest R&D investors in the world.
“The gravity has been shifting to Asia in terms of science funding and higher-education participation for the past 20 years,” Marginson adds, with this now being accompanied by “a strange American implosion, which has accelerated the change in narrative”.
The survey — which gathered responses from a representative sample across regions, disciplines and background factors, such as gender — also found that some 17.5% of scientists in Europe and 18% in North America said they were likely or very likely to leave research entirely in the next two to three years.
By contrast, only 6.5% of respondents in Africa and South America and 10% in Asia and Oceania said they expected to leave.
The survey also showed differences between male and female researchers. Around 17% of women were likely to leave research in the next two to three years, compared with 14% of men. Women were also more likely to feel that funding was decreasing: 57% reported declining funding, compared with 51% of men.
Lynn Nygaard, a specialist in academic writing at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, who also studies gender and diversity in academia, says this could reflect the concentration of women in early-career roles, which can be “incredibly insecure”.
“In the social sciences in Norway, for example, women actually outnumber men in early-career positions,” she says. In 2022, across European Union countries, women made up just 20% of researchers in the most senior, secure positions in science and engineering, compared with 34% of those in early-career roles, according to the latest edition of the European Commission’s She Figures report. “[Early-career] contracts can be just a few months long, and nobody can live like that for very long without it becoming a major source of stress,” Nygaard adds.
“It’s not surprising that people in those positions are more likely to think about leaving,” she adds. “And women are simply more likely to be there.”
