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My lab:
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In this week's Science, Rui Sousa from UT San Antonio points out, how absurd it is to evaluate researchers by the amount of money they spend, rather than on their productivity, in other words, the research dollars they spend per publication:
No prestige should be attached to the level of funding that an investigator has managed to secure. The most basic of truths must be emphasized: Money is a means, not an end. We do not do science to get money. We get money to do science. Funding cannot be a measure of productivity, because scientists do not produce research dollars. Research dollars are produced by taxpayers [...]. The amount of money spent by a researcher is not a measure of his productivity, but of his consumption, and might even be counted on the negative side of the ledger when he is evaluated.
One of the easiest ways to measure productivity is to count the dollars spent for a research paper (more complicated measures may include the type, scope, impact and/or length of paper etc.). I have received approx. 35k Euros in research funding since Jan. 2004. Since then, I have published 8 research papers, with two more in the pipeline. For the sake of simplicity, let's say I have published ten papers with 40k, which makes roughly 4 grand for an average of my research papers. Is that good or bad? I have no idea, since so far, nobody ever really evaluated research like that.
Posted on Friday 28 November 2008 - 09:09:58 comment: 0
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