  In this paper we consider the scientific and career performance of principal
investigators (PI's) of publicly funded research projects compared to
scientific performance of all researchers. Our study is based on high quality
data about (i) research projects awarded in Slovenia in the period 1994-2016
(7508 projects with 2725 PI's in total) and (ii) about scientific productivity
of all researchers in Slovenia that were active in the period 1970-2016 - there
are 19598 such researchers in total, including the PI's. We compare average
productivity, collaboration, internationality and interdisciplinarity of PI's
and of all active researchers. Our analysis shows that for all four indicators
the average performance of PI's is much higher compared to average performance
of all active researchers. Additionally, we analyze careers of both groups of
researchers. The results show that the PI's have on average longer and more
fruitful career compared to all active researchers, with regards to all career
indicators. The PI's that have received a postdoc grant have at the beginning
outstanding scientific performance, but later deviate towards average. On long
run, the PI's leading the research programs (the most prestigious grants) on
average demonstrate the best scientific performance. In the last part of the
paper we study 23 co-authorship networks, spanned by all active researchers in
the periods 1970-1994, ..., 1970-2016. We find out that they are well connected
and that PI's are well distributed across these networks forming their
backbones. Even more, PI's generate new PI's, since more than 90% of new PI's
are connected (have at least one joint scientific publication) with existing
PI's. We believe that our study sheds new light to the relations between the
public funding of the science and the scientific output and can be considered
as an affirmative answer to the question posed in the title.
