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Editor's Note: This article, which discusses the salaries of nonsupervisory research-and-development personnel, is the first of a two-part series. The second part, dealing with the salaries of supervisory R&D professionals, will appear in the July 22 issue. The mean salary for research-and-development specialists--including a wide range of professionals in the physical and life sciences--fluctuated greatly in 1990 as compared with the prior year, according to a new survey by Abbott, Langer & Associates, a management consulting firm based in Crete, Ill. In some cases, mean salaries rose to match cost-of-living adjustments. For other science professionals, salaries were stable owing to the recessionary economy. And in a few categories, mean salaries dropped, suggesting a greater percentage of new entrants in the job market. The overall trend was toward slight increases for some research-and-development jobs, which also included engineering positions, although Abbott, Langer grouped these separately. Salary statistics for supervisory staffers, such as directors and managers, were also compiled separately. (These will be discussed in the July 22, 1991, issue of The Scientist.) The consulting firm received responses from 244 organizations, including a wide range of manufacturers, universities, government agencies, and nonprofit research firms. The survey was sponsored by the Chicago-based Society of Research Administrators, which has more than 2,600 individual members. Not all respondents to the study were SRA members. The survey found that nonsupervisory R&D professionals tended to earn the highest salaries in the Midwestern and Southern states. State by state, overall compensation was highest in New Jersey, New Mexico, Indiana, and Illinois. The best-paying metro area was New York City/northern New Jersey. Manufacturing firms provided higher compensation than other organizations for research and development professionals. (Although many segments of the nation's manufacturing industry are mired in recession, some firms, such as pharmaceutical companies, continue to be havens for employment.) For-profit contract research centers and medical and scientific equipment manufacturers also tended to be among the highest-paying employers, Abbott, Langer reported. Overall, research-and-development professionals received a mean salary of $35,832, a 19 percent drop from $44,211 in 1989. Yet despite this general finding, the survey revealed that pay for employees in some categories rose substantially. For instance, the mean annual salary for biochemists was $39,685, a 26 percent increase. And mean annual salaries for chemists advanced 15 percent, to $48,744. As a group, professionals in the physical sciences received a 4 percent hike in mean annual salary, to $47,006. "Even though there's been a cutback in R&D at a lot of companies, one of the things driving up salaries is the [decreased] availability of people, " says Fred Atkinson, director of product development and quality control at Dunkin' Donuts, Braintree, Mass. "Three to four years ago, I could get people very easily." Nonetheless, several survey participants reported that the outlook for salary increases, at least in the short term, was hazy at best. Each one blamed the recessionary economy, which has forced companies to cut back on costs, including spending for research and development. "We get government contract work, and to keep your programs, you have to be careful not to elevate salaries when times are tough," says Edward M. Davis, president of Sym-Biotech Inc., a Wallingford, Conn., firm. Similarly, salaries paid by the Illinois Hazardous Waste Research and Information Center, based in Champaign, didn't rise above inflation rates, reflecting legislative concern over budgets. "We're tied to legislative mandates," says an official of the agency, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Government funding has declined, so I would expect salaries to drop," says A. James McKnight, president of National Public Services Research Institute, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Landover, Md., that does research in safety and health issues. However, McKnight also notes that his firm held salaries down during much of the past five years. To compensate, his staff--largely consisting of behavioral scientists--received combined increases during the past two years of roughly 25 percent. Disciplines for which the survey reported declines included biology, in which the mean annual salary was $24,472, a drop of 20 percent from the 1989 figure. But, on the bright side, biologists with Ph.D.'s who worked between five and nine years saw a 2 percent increase in annual salary, to $31,713. The mean annual salary for physicists fell 8 percent, to $47,483. However, these findings may be skewed, because in 1990 there were only 32 respondents in this category, compared with 83 participants in the previous year's survey. Indeed, other variables indicate that the picture isn't entirely gloomy for R&D professionals whose nationwide mean salary showed a decline between 1989 and 1990: Biologists in Pennsylvania, for instance, reported a 28 percent raise, to $31,268. And while biologists nationwide were paid less at nonmanufacturing companies--a 24 percent drop, to $24,262--those at manufacturing firms were paid $35,119, a 10 percent increase. "But I think the job market is very soft," says Eric Cooper, staff compensation consultant for Inland Steel Co. of East Chicago, Ind., where the research-and-development staff includes about 60 materials scientists and metallurgical engineers. "We've seen unusually low turnover," he says. "My own hiring has been flat for the past couple of years." Edward R. Silverman is a freelance writer based in Hoboken, N.J.

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