The impacts of Centers for AIDS Research program and its enlargement on HIV/AIDS research collaboration

Abstract

The Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) is a large-scale and important program designed to enhance and coordinate high-quality human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) research. This paper explores the long-term (1985-2019) causal impacts of the CFAR program and its enlargement (three enlargement waves when new centers were recruited) on HIV/AIDS research collaboration. The dataset consists of HIV/AIDS-related research article publications collected from the Web of Science. First, the study applies the propensity score matching method combined with difference-in-difference (DiD) models to test the overall causal impact of the CFAR program on HIV/AIDS research collaboration. Then, by categorizing institutions into different groups based on recruitment stages and defining ten intra-/inter-group collaborations, the study constructs time-varying DiD models to explore the causal impacts of three enlargement waves of CFAR for the ten collaborations. The results show that CFAR and its enlargements have positive impacts on HIV/AIDS research collaboration, although the enlargements' impacts are heterogeneous and specifically vary over time and across collaborations.