The dangers of performance-based research funding in non-competitive higher education systems

Abstract

An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top scientists are dispersed among all the universities, rather than concentrated among a few, there is a high risk of penalizing those top scientists who work in lower-performance universities. Using a five-year bibliometric analysis conducted on all Italian universities active in the hard sciences from 2004-2008, this work analyzes the distribution of publications and relevant citations by scientists within the universities, measures the research performance of individual scientists, quantifies the intensity of concentration of top scientists at each university, provides performance rankings for the universities, and indicates the effects of selective funding on the top scientists of low-ranked universities.

References in corpus (2)

• A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments
• National-scale research performance assessment at the individual level

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The impact of unproductive and top researchers on overall university research performance
• The collaboration behaviors of scientists in Italy: a field level analysis
• Revisiting size effects in higher education research productivity
• An assessment of the first "scientific accreditation" for university appointments in Italy
• Refrain from adopting the combination of citation and journal metrics to grade publications, as used in the Italian national research assessment exercise (VQR 2011-2014)
• The north-south divide in the Italian higher education system
• Evaluating university research: same performance indicator, different rankings
• Variability of research performance across disciplines within universities in non-competitive higher education systems
• The spin-off of elite universities in non-competitive, undifferentiated higher education systems: an empirical simulation in Italy
• The dispersion of the citation distribution of top scientists' publications
• Analyzing the disciplinary focus of universities: Can rankings be a one-size-fits-all?
• An insight into the importance of national university rankings in an international context: The case of the I-UGR Rankings of Spanish universities
• The impact of a few: The effect of alternative formulas for recruiting talent in a non-competitive system