What Happens When Funding is Linked to Publication Counts?

Abstract

Many countries are placing a greater emphasis on public accountability for government research funding and are starting to use quantitative performance indicators for the distribution of funds. In Australian universities the use of quantitative formulas to allocate the research component of university block grants to institutions has been in place for a decade, and thus the system provides fertile ground for using bibliometrics to examine the effects of such policies on academic output. An analysis of Australian data from the Institute for Scientific Information’s major citation indexes clearly demonstrates the academic response to the linking of funds, at least in part, to productivity measures undifferentiated by any measure of quality — publication numbers jumped dramatically, with the highest percentage increase in the lower impact journals. The trends were apparent across all fields of research in the university sector, but were not present in other sectors active in research (such as hospitals or government research agencies). The trends were not, however, uniform across all institutions.