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Increasingly, funding of academic research is carried out through the support of collaboration, rather than through single awards to a sole grant holder. The practice is well supported by evidence that larger, network-based research achieves high quality while leading to a number of capacity building benefits for the research system, although with significant transaction costs. However, the question of what kind of funding schemes should be made available to researchers is not a simple dichotomy between single grant-holder projects and networks. A key question is how to achieve a balance in each subject field between different forms of funding instrument employed while ensuring different forms of funding retain a reputation for generating research of high scientific quality. This paper reports the results of a systematic comparison of the scientific quality of 1010 scientific papers from the ISI database …