Supervisors: Michael Zaggl & Lars Frederiksen
Discussants: Michela Beretta & Keld Pedersen

Abstract
Crowdfunding for science is emerging as a viable option to access monetary resources to finance research activities. The lower barrier to entry, compared to the more traditional research funding channels, allows for a broad spectrum of researchers with disparate backgrounds to apply for financing their research. In this paper, we aim to explore how crowdfunding for science influences the fund seekers’ research topic trajectories by investigating previous expertise, the campaign content, and the subsequent follow-up after the campaign. We employ data from Experiment.com, the largest crowdfunding for science platform, and link 891 first-listed fund-seekers to their Elsevier’s Scopus account to collect their authored publications and research topics histories. The findings highlight that winning a crowdfunding campaign is associated with more diversification of research interests by junior academics (i.e., Ph.D. students). For researchers with previous expertise within the campaign’s topic, obtaining funding from the crowdfunding campaign relates to higher chances of continuing the campaign’s topic research trajectory. Yet, within researchers launching a new research topic with the crowdfunding campaign, only senior academics (i.e., full professors) associate winning with higher chances to undertake the new research path.

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