Metrics of Inequality: The Concentration of Resources in the U.S. Biomedical Elite

ABSTRACT

Academic scientists and research institutes are increasingly being evaluated using digital metrics, from bibliometrics to patent counts. These metrics are often framed, by science policy analysts, economists of science as well as funding agencies, as objective and universal proxies for scientific worth, potential, and productivity. In biomedical science, where there is stiff competition for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), metrics are sold as a less arbitrary way to allocate funds, yet the funding context in which metrics are applied is not critically examined. Success by the metrics is in fact inextricably linked to the distribution of NIH funds, and from the 1980s to the 2000s, NIH funding has been marked by high inequality (elite investigators and institutes get the lion’s share of resources) and decreased mobility (those who start at the bottom are less likely to rise to the upper ranks). Elite investigators and institutes currently produce the bulk of prestigious publications, citations, and patents that commonly used metrics valorise. Metrics-based evaluation therefore reproduces, and potentially amplifies, existing inequalities in academic science and rich-get-richer effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberal science
• entrepreneurial science
• metrics
• biomedical science
• science funding
• inequality

Acknowledgments

We thank Ariella Azoulay, Nazim Bouatta, Vincent Butty, Jenny Chen, Bruno S. Frey, Lukas Rieppel, Alois Stutzer, Lauren Surface, Caleb Weinreb and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an early draft of this work. We also thank the NIH RePORT team for their careful work in maintaining the ExPORTER database and assistance in using it. Finally, thanks to the editors of Science as Culture for their feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yarden Katz is a departmental fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD in 2014 from MIT.

Ulrich Matter is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Political Science (SEPS-HSG) University of St. Gallen and a member of the Swiss Institute for International Economics and Applied Economic Research (SIAW). He received his PhD in 2015 from the University of Basel.

Notes

1 While we focus on the U.S. in this article, similar developments have taken place in Canadian universities (Polster and Newson 2015) and European universities (Maassen and Stensaker 2011).

2 These changes had antecedents, however, and as Kleinman (2010) argued, the influence of individual policies such as the Bayh-Dole Act shouldn’t be overstated.

3 Some scientists themselves have used such metrics to try to ‘game’ the system or predict their own chances for career advancement (Dijk et al., 2014; Kaiser, 2017a; Stidham et al., 2012).