Online Crowdfunding as Academic Grants: a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Funding is one of the main factors for academic researchers to achieve success throughout their academic career. The traditional method of requesting research grants from corporations (through research and development departments) and government (primarily carried out through universities and specialized government agencies) takes a long time to process, and in addition, the competition is fierce. The review is carried out by performing a systematic literature review in order to identify and discover what and how online crowdfunding is being used, and, to recognize its role in any kind of academic grants. Several research questions are designed and multiple of research papers and studies are collected and analyzed. The data collected from the studies were then used to answer the research questions. The findings include, the types of crowdfunding models, advantages and disadvantages of crowdfunding for the research domains, crowdfunding platform evaluation and the crowdfunding scenes in Malaysia. With this review, the data collected and answers from the questions could provide insights into crowdfunding as an alternative for academic grants funding in Malaysia, other than the conventional methods.