More than half of the researchers behind the world's most influential recent science say funding for their work is declining, not growing. That finding comes from the Nature Index 'Research Leaders' survey, published 21 January 2026, which polled thousands of scientists who authored some of the highest-impact publications of the past few years.

The headline result is directional rather than absolute: respondents were asked whether funding for leading research projects is more likely to be falling or increasing, and the declining side won. Nature Index has not placed the exact split behind a figure in the publicly available summary, so R&D managers reading the supplement should treat 'more than half' as the survey's own framing rather than a precise margin. What the sample does have going for it is selection quality — these are principal investigators and group leaders with recent high-influence output, the population most likely to hold active grants and to feel budget shifts first.

Who wants to leave research?

The survey's second finding may matter more for workforce planning than the funding number itself. Scientists in North America and Europe are much more likely than their counterparts elsewhere to say they intend to leave research altogether.

That regional asymmetry deserves scrutiny before drawing conclusions. Intent-to-leave responses are soft signals: they capture sentiment at a moment of budget uncertainty, not resignations. The survey does not, in the available material, break down whether the intent comes from senior principal investigators, postdocs or early-career staff, and attrition risk differs sharply across those groups. Still, when the exit signal concentrates precisely in the two regions that have historically supplied the largest share of global R&D funding, portfolio planners should take note.

What context sits behind the numbers?

The survey lands amid a documented squeeze on the two largest US basic-science funders. Nature's own recent coverage, linked alongside the survey, reports NIH pivoting away from agency-directed science, new NSF grants reduced to a trickle by delays, and charted evidence of Trump 2.0-era cuts to NIH-backed research alongside proposed reductions at NSF. Respondents in the United States are presumably answering survey questions against that backdrop.

For R&D managers, three practical reads emerge from the findings:

• Grant renewals carry more risk than a year ago. If a majority of elite researchers report declining funding, continuity assumptions in multi-year project budgets deserve stress-testing.
• Talent pipelines in North America and Europe may loosen. Elevated exit intent among researchers in these regions suggests both a retention problem and, potentially, a hiring opportunity for institutions in better-funded systems.
• Survey data is perception data. Measured agency outlays, grant success rates and award sizes remain the harder evidence; this supplement captures how the people producing influential science experience the environment.

How solid is the methodology?

Nature Index says its news and supplement content is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature — a relevant disclosure given that the publisher also sells subscriptions to the journals covering this territory. The surveyed population is defined by publication influence in recent years, which biases the sample toward active, productive researchers in fields indexed by Nature Index. That bias cuts both ways: it sharpens the picture of elite research conditions while underrepresenting researchers who have already exited, failed to secure funding, or work in poorly indexed fields.

The full survey, including exact response counts and regional breakdowns, sits behind Nature's access options, with article purchase priced between $1.95 and $39.95 depending on type.

Nature Index will need follow-up waves to show whether the reported decline reflects a durable shift or a cyclical trough — and whether the exit intent of North American and European researchers converts into actual departures from the scientific workforce.