Top Academic Research Centers Boast Variety Of Strengths, Strategies

Targeted alliances and sharply focused planning as well as financial clout are factors in their high achievement Which are the top research universities in the United States? And what makes them the best? Not surprisingly, there are no hard and fast answers to these questions. But when several indicators are compared--such as total research-and-development spending, citations per published paper, and the number of science Nobelists coming from their respective campuses--some general conclusions can be drawn, according to research administrators. One salient, if predictable, conclusion points to the strong tie between an institution's research achievement record and its financial strength and overall resources: The better-funded schools tend to rank highly in citations per paper and in the number of Nobel Prize winners who were on campus when they received their awards. Although significant correlations among high rankings according to the various criteria (see tables on pages 8 and 9) are frequently observable, certain dramatic anomalies defy the identification of absolute causal links. In this first part of a two-part series, administrators at notable research universities discuss some of the quantifiable factors frequently used in measuring the scientific prowess of their schools. In the second part, to appear in the March 22, 1993, issue, research faculty will address qualitative factors -- such as high morale and a supportive environment -- that they consider pre-requisite to the success of academic research. University officials interviewed for this article point out, for example, the high level of return possible, in terms of research excellence, from strategically focusing an academic institution's scientific efforts. Such tactics can include forming targeted alliances with neighboring research facilities or actively encouraging collaborative work between specific scientific disciplines. The University of California, Santa Cruz, is a perfect example. That institution does not appear on the list of top 100 universities when total spending for R&D is the ranking factor, according to 1991 National Science Foundation data. And it has nothing to show as far as producing Nobel-winning scientists. But when citations per paper in recent years are the consideration, as measured by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information, it becomes clear that the institution is doing something right. By that measure, UC-Santa Cruz placed first in physical sciences and 12th in biological sciences. TOTAL R&D EXPENDITURES RANK INSTITUTION AMOUNT 1 Johns Hopkins U. $710,095* 2 U. Michigan 363,582 3 U. Minnesota 331,471 4 U. Wisconsin, Madison 326,489 5 MIT 318,901** 6 Stanford U. 310,429 7 Cornell U. 309,535** 8 Texas A&M U. 288,005 9 U. Washington 274,423 10 U. California, San Francisco 268,700 * Includes Applied Physics Laboratory, with $439 million in total R&D expenditures. ** Does not include R&D expenditures at university-associated federally funded R&D centers. Source: National Science Foundation (NSF 92-329) Many university administrators have mixed views about efforts to rank schools according to strictly quantifiable--some would say reductionist--criteria. Many see such rankings as useful indicators of research activity, but, at the same time, they warn of the ways a ranking can mask or distort important information about an institution. "You can't just rack up dollars, Nobel Prizes, and so on [to assess institutions]," says Arden Albee, dean of graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "But, by the same token, ratings are either done that way or by doing polls of reputation. Each is clearly subject to errors." For example, he says, a school's reputation--or a department's reputation, often the more meaningful organizational level at which to gauge an institution--can lag behind current reality significantly. "If a department has gotten lots of good new people--or lost some of its key people," Albee says, "it takes a while before the reputation catches up." Whatever the measure, Caltech's reputation is among the strongest of all U.S. research centers. The university ranked only 49th in total spending, but, in citations per paper, it ranked first in chemistry, second in biological sciences, and eighth in physical sciences. And only two other schools better Caltech's count of 11 Nobel Prizes in science. The two schools with a greater number of science Nobel Prizes than Caltech are Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.--the prohibitive leader with 24--and Rockefeller University in New York City, with 13. Interestingly, of the roughly 170 U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, 97--well over half the total--have gone to just 10 universities. But the importance of a university researcher who brings home the Nobel Prize is open to differing interpretations, too, Albee cautions. "If you look at our Nobel Prizes, for example," he says, "most of them were for work done before the person came here. To a certain extent, it means we're providing a research environment that attracts those kinds of people." It may also mean that Caltech has a good ability to identify future Nobel winners, he says. BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES Rank Inst. Num. of Total Citations papers Cites Per Paper 1 Rockefeller U. 1,646 13,094 7.96 2 Caltech 837 6,450 7.71 3 MIT 2,025 14,246 7.04 4 Stanford U. 3,962 24,539 6.19 5 Princeton U. 612 3,713 6.07 6 U. California, Berkeley 2,353 14,025 5.96 7 Harvard U. 10,610 59,557 5.61 8 U. California, San Francisco 5,908 29,838 5.05 9 U. California, San Diego 3,824 17,566 4.59 10 U. Oregon 378 1,731 4.58 Source: ScienceWatch, Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia Albee says that as long as one doesn't believe that an institution that ranks No. 1 in a given ranking scheme is actually the best--if, for example, one looks instead at more general groupings, say, the first or second 10 schools--then the rankings can be instructive. Another longtime research powerhouse is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. Fifth in overall expenditures, in citations per paper MIT ranks third in biological sciences, fifth in chemistry, and 13th in physical sciences. MIT researchers have also won seven science Nobels-- only five other universities have taken more. "Citations and Nobel Prizes are probably pretty good indicators for peer-reviewed research, which is basic in nature," says J. David Litster, vice president and dean for research at MIT. "They're not as relevant for applied research. For example, there are no Nobel Prizes in engineering. And total funding, of course, is also a useful indicator." Litster notes, however, that the share of an institution's funding that comes from federal earmarking rather than from competitive grants is an example of important information sometimes buried in a ranking. He says that such "pork barrel" funding, now totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars, hurts the research process, at both the institutional and national levels. "We try very hard not to accept funding that comes by that route," Litster says. "It's not in the country's best interests to spend its [research] money that way, and MIT probably wouldn't do as well if funds were allocated that way rather than on the basis of the quality of the research." One government official familiar with federal research spending, speaking on condition of anonymity, notes that it can be important to consider the level of Defense Department spending at a given university. "Defense funding, in general, does not lead to as many papers as civilian funding," this official says, citing the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, as examples of schools with high levels of defense funding for research. CHEMISTRY (CITATION ANALYSIS, 1984-91) Rank Inst. Num. of Total Citations papers Cites Per Paper 1 Caltech 873 16,101 18.44 2 Harvard U. 856 15,035 17.56 3 U. Chicago 729 11,709 16.06 4 U. California, Santa Barbara 691 10,519 15.22 5 MIT 1,415 21,405 15.13 6 U. Colorado, Boulder 698 10,373 14.86 7 Yale U. 732 10,809 14.77 8 Stanford U. 952 14,049 14.76 9 U. N.Carolina, Chapel Hill 722 10, 648 14.75 10 Northwestern U. 871 12, 328 14.15 Source: ScienceWatch, Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia Thomas Linney, vice president of the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, D.C., like Caltech's Albee, says that whole- institution rankings can obscure relevant organizational factors. "It occurs to me to ask whether the medical units are part of the [data]," Linney says. "In the case of the University of Maryland, for example, the medical unit [in Baltimore] is separate from the rest of the university [in College Park]. Whereas, at most private campuses, like Stanford [University in California], the medical units are indistinguishable from the graduate school." The place of medical school data in the rankings is especially important, he says, because so much current research funding is biomedical in nature. Linney also notes that campuses often have one or two specialized areas of research. Whether a particular data set does or does not include that specialty will have a significant impact on the rankings outcome. "It's a real thicket," Linney says of the effort to rank research universities, "and I don't know any good way out of it once you get into it." Even with the caveats in mind, comparisons among the indicators of total R&D spending, citation impacts in different areas, and number of Nobel Prize winners do point to the research strengths of many universities. Some are the familiar, tested names in American university-based research, but others are the younger, smaller institutions rising to new prominence. PHYSICAL SCIENCES (CITATION ANALYSIS, 1984-91) Rank Inst. Num. of Total Citations papers Cites Per Paper 1 U. California, Santa Cruz 547 2,495 4.56 2 Harvard U. 2,253 9,479 4.21 3 Princeton U. 1,933 7,273 3.76 4 U. Chicago 1,327 4,959 3.74 5 U. California, Santa Barbara 1,522 5,438 3.57 6 Yale U. 1,177 3,940 3.35 7 Boston U. 561 1,848 3.29 8 Caltech 3,121 10,224 3.28 9 Stanford U. 2,887 9,445 3.27 10 U. Houston 892 2,757 3.09 Source: ScienceWatch, Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia One of these younger, smaller research institutions apparently performing beyond its financial resources is UC-Santa Cruz. Although failing to appear in the top 100 spenders for R&D, the school ranked first in physical sciences citation impact and 12th in biological sciences. According to David Kliger, dean of natural sciences, one reason for the small university's research success is, in fact, its youth. Founded in 1965, the school still has a relatively young, active faculty, Kliger says. But also contributing to the success, he says, is a series of alliances the university formed early on with top-notch scientific facilities nearby, to establish research capacity and credibility from the start. "When the campus was formed," Kliger says, "we incorporated Lick Observatory, so they formed the core of our astronomy department. Now, we have what most people regard as one of the best astronomy departments in the world. And that's where a large number of the citations are." Astronomer James Lick formed the observatory on California's Mount Hamilton in the last century. Recently, Lick Observatory built a 10-meter optical telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the largest such telescope in the world. UC-Santa Cruz is also strong in the area of high-energy physics research, says Kliger. U.S. NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS (In Residence At Time Of Award) Rank Inst. Num. of Laureates 1 Harvard U. 24 2 Rockefeller U. 13 3 Caltech 11 4 U. California, Berkeley 10 5 Stanford U. 9 6 Columbia U. 7 - MIT 7 7 Cornell U. 6 - U. Chicago 6 8 Princeton U. 4 Source:Nobel Foundation Directory "We concentrated on high-energy physics because of our proximity to SLAC [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center], so that we could take advantage of a large research facility that was close by," Kliger says. "We built up a first-string high-energy physics program, which you might not expect at a relatively small school." Similarly, UC-Santa Cruz turned its location in earthquake-prone California to advantage by creating a tectonics institute, leading to highly cited research in the earth sciences. The University of Oregon in Eugene is also not among the top 100 R&D spenders. Yet citations of papers by the university's researchers placed Oregon 10th in biological sciences and 25th in physical sciences. John T. Moseley, vice president for research at the University of Oregon, says the school's relatively small size, the high quality of its faculty, and its long-term commitment to the sciences go a long way toward explaining its research successes. But he also notes that the university's efforts to encourage cross-disciplinary interactions have led to increased research productivity. These efforts began with the Institute for Molecular Biology, now 30 years old, which he calls the school's strongest single research area. That institute occupies the third floor of the physics, chemistry, and two biology buildings, Moseley says, which are interconnected by bridges and walkways. The upshot of the arrangement is that the institute is horizontally organized, while the departments are vertically organized. Other institutes on campus have been built on the same model. "We have consciously set up a series of interdisciplinary institutes that are tightly interwoven with the departments," Moseley says. "We think it is important not to take these high- level [institute] researchers and locate them in their own building so that they're not participants in the departmental activities. And that has worked for us. It's fostered a lot of collaborations." Moseley emphasizes that construction of the buildings, the last of which was occupied in 1990, post-dates most of the high- citation research. "We didn't get the citations by building those buildings," he says. "The buildings are more a manifestation of the spirit that already existed here." Rice University in Houston ranked 13th in chemistry citations per paper, while not appearing in the top R&D spenders. Dean of graduate studies Graham Glass says the explanation tracks to a single, developed research strength. "It's buckyballs, I'm sure," Glass says. "I would tell you we've had a more productive [chemistry] department than the national funding [data] would suggest anyway, but what probably dominates the citations index would be citations in that area." Discovered by Rice researcher Richard Smalley and colleagues a half-dozen years ago, buckyballs--60-atom icosahedral molecules of carbon--have sparked enormous research interest, says Glass. "It's a very active field," he says. "And since we were in on the initial discovery, we have several groups working on more broadly based chemistry relating to it." Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., is not among the top R&D spenders, yet ranks 16th in biological sciences citations and 24th in chemistry citations. Arthur Reis is associate provost responsible for all research activities at Brandeis. He says the school's research success is partly tied to its being primarily focused on a few areas--for example, structural biology, neurobiology, and genetics and molecular biology in the biological sciences. These areas, in turn, have received solid resource commitments from the administration to back them up. Reis says Brandeis also maintains stringent standards, at the departmental level, in hiring and retaining faculty. "Sometimes we have delayed a search if we couldn't find someone we really wanted," Reis says. "And not everyone that is brought in, even though they come out first on a national search, makes it through the tenure process here." Reis suggests there are different ways to view the total R&D budget at an institution that might serve as better research indicators. "Many times, you see the national rankings based on overall dollars brought in from the federal government," Reis says. This favors the largest institutions, he says. "But if you start normalizing it, then you get a place like Brandeis, which is fairly small, has a high-quality faculty, and brings in a significant amount of research dollars per faculty member." His calculations show an R&D income of about $230,000 per faculty member, for example. "That's a lot of money, normalized over everyone, and it includes people with just a teaching appointment."

Top Academic Research Centers Boast Variety Of Strengths, Strategies

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