What have they been up to with all that money?
While the NIH budget doubling has created a crisis for life sciences grant applicants, what about its benefits? One of the most pronounced effects of the budget doubling was a huge building spree by medical schools. Presumably there has also been an increase in research output, right?
A new NSF report makes me wonder. According to the press release, "the number of U.S. science and engineering (S&E) articles in major peer-reviewed journals flattened in the 1990s, after more than two decades of growth.... Flattening occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions."
I haven't read the full report yet, so I'm still scratching my head. Here's the report, and here's a discussion on Slashdot.
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on Fri, Jul 20, 05:07PM
I found that report incomprehensible. Figures present either growth or share without any context. Is there a table or figure in their that shows the total number of publications by country, by year? Without that, I have no idea how zero-sum "major" publications are.
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on Fri, Jul 20, 07:07PM
I don't have that in front of me, but I think there was a bit in there about papers being counted fractionally, like 1 paper with 50 authors is 1/50th of a paper per author. Megamultiauthor papers were unheard of in NIH's corner of biology not too long ago.
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