  Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and
external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation?
Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades,
enabling us to characterise changes in the funding landscape and their impacts
on the underlying collaboration patterns. We observed rising inequality in the
distribution of funding and its effect was most noticeable at the institutional
level in which the leading universities diversified their collaborations and
increasingly became the knowledge brokers. Furthermore, these universities
formed a cohesive core through their close ties, and such reliance appeared to
be a key for their research success, with the elites in the core
over-attracting resources but in turn rewarding in both research breadth and
depth. Our results reveal how collaboration networks undergo previously unknown
adaptive organisation in response to external driving forces, which can have
far-reaching implications for future policy.
