Location influences academic productivity in the life sciences

Researchers who move to higher-performing institutions tend to publish more, according to analysis of data from 300,000 US scientists

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View of the Boston, Massachusetts, waterfront at night, with illuminated buildings reflected in the water. The image shows the skyline of the city, which is home to important scientific research centers and educational institutions.

More than 50% of the scientific output of researchers in the life sciences can be attributed to the institution at which they work, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in July.

Economists Amitabh Chandra and Connie Xu, both from Harvard University, analyzed data from 300,000 scientists affiliated with American teaching and research institutions who published articles between 1945 and 2023.

They concluded that scientists from institutions located in the Boston region of Massachusetts were most productive, publishing two to three times more articles per year than colleagues in other metropolitan areas.

They also observed that when scientists transferred from a less productive institution to one with a higher average output, their own productivity tended to increase.

Institutional factors remain undetermined

The authors were unable to identify precisely which institutional characteristics were related to the increase in output. They hypothesized, however, that it may be linked to funding, laboratory infrastructure, and the presence of postgraduate students.

Previous research supports this idea: scientists from top universities in the US working in fields where collaboration and coauthorship are common tend to be more productive, according to an article published in Science Advances in 2022.

This suggests that it is collective work that boosts productivity, rather than characteristics inherent to the institutions.

Productivity versus equity in science funding

The paper published by NBER is part of a political debate that has been going on in the US for decades: how should federal research funding be distributed?

Should funding agencies seek to maximize scientific output—which would lead to funding being concentrated at a few elite institutions—or should they distribute resources more broadly?

Chandra and Xu’s findings highlight the advantages of prioritizing more productive institutions:

“If funders are choosing between two equally productive scientists, one at an institution whose average research output is twice the other’s, then funders could get more than 50% more research by prioritizing a scientist at the more productive institution,” the authors suggest.

Concentration of funding reinforces historical inequalities

Some argue that scientists at elite institutions may be more productive simply because they receive large sums of money over many decades, and that choosing to allocate resources to them disproportionately would only amplify the historical inequities that created these differences.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the country’s top biomedical research funding agency, currently directs 94% of its budget to researchers in just 27 US states.

However, evidence suggests that when grants are awarded to scientists from less-funded states, they are also productive and publish high-quality articles.

A 2023 study in the journal PLOS One found that in states that receive less funding, the scientific community publishes more articles and receives more citations per million dollars in federal funding than in states that receive greater financial support.

Initiatives strive to correct regional imbalances

Chandra and Xu acknowledge that it is perfectly valid to base funding decisions on priorities other than scientific output, such as reducing inequalities in funding distribution.

The NIH has taken steps to address these concerns, and others. In January, it revised its grant evaluation procedures to reduce the emphasis placed on the researcher’s expertise and the institution’s resources, instead prioritizing the quality of the proposal.

Two years ago, the NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF) established two programs—the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)—that allocate part of their budgets to research carried out in states that traditionally receive less funding.

However, given the possibility of significant budget cuts under the Donald Trump administration, concern is growing about the future of these programs.

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