How is Swiss research funded?
A visual story about the Swiss National Science Foundation
13.02.2024
Disclaimer: This is a personal project undertaken in my free time and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or mandated in any way by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Each of these circles represents one of the 2906 research grants awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2024. The size of each circle is directly proportional to the amount of funding received. These grants are crucial for enabling good research in Switzerland, allowing scientists and institutions to pursue innovative projects, purchase necessary equipment, hire personnel, and contribute to advancements in various fields.
Hover over the circles to learn more.
The grants issued by the SNSF are categorized into five major funding types: project funding, career funding, science communication, research programs, and infrastructure funding.
Project funding is the most common, supporting research ideas proposed by scientists in any discipline. Career funding helps young researchers develop their professional paths, ensuring the next generation of scientists can contribute to Swiss and global knowledge. Science communication funding aims to bridge the gap between research and the general public, making complex scientific findings accessible. Research programs focus on interdisciplinary studies tackling critical global challenges, and infrastructure funding ensures Swiss research institutions remain equipped with modern facilities and technology.
Inside each of the five main funding categories, grants are further classified by scientific discipline. This ensures that different fields receive appropriate levels of funding based on their unique needs.
While individual grants provide support to specific researchers and projects, their overall impact becomes clearer when we aggregate funding amounts within each discipline. Some fields, such as medicine and engineering, require larger grants due to the high cost of materials, experiments, and equipment. Other disciplines, such as humanities and theoretical sciences, often require less funding but support a larger number of individual researchers.
While technical and experimental sciences tend to receive larger funding amounts due to the high costs of their methodologies, other disciplines, such as social sciences and humanities, receive a greater number of smaller grants. This discrepancy is primarily due to the nature of research needs—lab-based sciences demand costly equipment and materials, whereas humanities research often relies more on access to archives, literature, and computational resources.
Out of the 2906 grants attributed in 2024, 2466 were given to Swiss institutes (85%). While major universities and research centers in cities like Zurich, Geneva, and Lausanne receive a large share of grants, funding is also distributed to smaller institutions across the country. This type of distribution has been fairly stable in the past.
Choose your field, grant type and year of interest below to explore the historical and geographical distribution of grants in Switzerland.
Finally, let's try to understand the historical trends in grant distribution. The SNSF has been awarding grants since 1952, and the number of grants has increased significantly over the years. The distribution of grants across fields has also evolved, reflecting changes in scientific priorities and societal needs. Most grants comes with a set of keywords that describe the research topic, and these keywords can be used to track the evolution of research interests over time. By doing a penalized regression on the keywords available in the dataset, we can identify the most important topics in each year.
Clearly, we can see trends appear and disappear over time, reflecting the evolution of research interests in Switzerland. For instance, recombinant DNA (recdna) was a major topic in the 90s, but has progressively been replaced by other topics such as Atlas (one of the CERN LHC main detectors being designed at the time, peaking around 2000), brain imaging (peaking around 2010), string theory (peaking around 20014, potentially due to the Higgs boson discovery) and more recently quantum computing (peaking around 2020).
Note that the scores only represent the relative impact on the funding of a keyword in a given period, which is why they are only partially correlated with the amount of funding over time.
Hover over the chart to explore the evolution of research topics in Switzerland since 1990.
About the Project
The dataset was obtained from the SNSF Data Portal. Data preparation, wrangling and analysis were done with Python, while the page and visuals were built with React and D3. Animations were done with GSAP and React Spring.
Hi there, I'm Colas!
I'm transitioning from academia to pursue my passion for data analysis and data visualization, and I’m always excited to share a new project! Your support means everything, whether it’s through a donation, sharing my work, or spreading the word. If you're interested in collaborating, I'm available for hire or contract work. Feel free to reach out!
