Above: West Virginia University scored high for publications and impact per federal dollar spent.
ISTOCK, AIMINTANG
In academic science, it’s no news that prestige matters. High-profile universities typically have their pick of the top candidates on the job market and garner the lion's share of federal grants—but reputation is no indicator of the efficiency or influence of research at an institution, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv on July 13. The author finds that, compared to the highest-ranking institutions, lower-ranking ones produce more publications and with more significance to their fields per dollar of funding.
“A more egalitarian distribution of funding among institutions would yield greater collective gains for the biomedical research enterprise and the taxpayers who support it,” argues Wayne Wahls, a molecular biologist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the author of the study, in the preprint.
The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) $37 billion ...
