In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), now Research Ireland, pivoted to research with potential socioeconomic impact. Given that the latter can encompass higher technology readiness levels, which typically correlates with lower academic impact, it is interesting to understand how academic impact holds up in SFI funded research. Here we decompose SFI \textit{Investigator Awards} - arguably the most academic funding call - into $3,243$ constituent publications and field weighted citation impact (FWCI) values searchable in the SCOPUS database. Given that citation counts are skewed, we highlight the limitation of FWCI as a paper metric, which naively restricts one to comparisons of average FWCI ($\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}}$) in large samples. Neglecting publications with $\textrm{FWCI} < 0.1$ ($8.8\%$), SFI funded publications are well approximated by a lognormal distribution with $μ= -0.0761^{+0.017}_{-0.0039}$ and $ σ= 0.933^{+0.011}_{-0.012}$ at $95 \%$ confidence level. This equates to an $\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}} = 1.433^{+0.029}_{-0.015}$ well above $\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}}=1$ internationally. Broken down by award, we correct $\overline{\mathrm{FWCI}}$ for small samples using simulations and find $\sim 67\%$ exceed \textit{median} international academic interest, thus exhibiting a positive correlation between the potential for socioeconomic impact and academic interest.

翻译：为应对2008年全球金融危机，爱尔兰科学基金会（现更名为"研究爱尔兰"）将资助重点转向具有潜在社会经济影响的研究。鉴于此类研究通常涉及更高的技术成熟度，而这往往与较低的学术影响力相关，因此探究爱尔兰科学基金会资助研究的学术影响力表现具有重要价值。本研究将其《研究者奖项》（可视为最具学术性的资助项目）分解为3,243篇组成论文，并通过SCOPUS数据库检索获得各篇的领域加权引用影响力值。考虑到引用计数的偏态分布特征，我们重点指出FWCI作为论文指标的局限性——该指标在原始状态下仅适用于大样本的平均FWCI比较。在剔除FWCI<0.1的文献（占比8.8%）后，爱尔兰科学基金会资助论文的FWCI分布近似服从对数正态分布，其参数μ=-0.0761^{+0.017}_{-0.0039}、σ=0.933^{+0.011}_{-0.012}（95%置信区间）。这对应着平均FWCI=1.433^{+0.029}_{-0.015}，显著高于国际基准值1。按奖项细分后，我们通过模拟计算对小样本的平均FWCI进行校正，发现约67%的奖项超过国际学术关注度的中位水平，从而揭示出社会经济影响潜力与学术关注度之间存在正相关关系。