How to measure research efficiency in higher education? Research grants vs. publication output

ABSTRACT

An ongoing debate in the literature on the efficiency of higher education institutions concerns the indicator for research output for use in empirical analysis. While several studies have chosen to use the number of publications as this indicator, others rely on the amount of research grants. The present study investigates whether both measures lead to a similar assessment of universities. In addition, the number of publications belonging to the 10% and 1% most frequently cited papers in the corresponding subject category and publication year are evaluated. We show that there is a high correlation of efficiency values between the estimations using these indicators. This correlation is slightly higher when the efficiency values result from a data envelopment analysis than when they are determined with a stochastic frontier analysis. The results of this study provide helpful guidelines for researchers evaluating the efficiency of universities and are valueable for decision-makers in science policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Efficiency
• research
• data envelopment analysis
• stochastic frontier analysis
• higher education
• Germany

Acknowledgments

The bibliometric data used in this paper are from an in-house database developed and maintained by the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL, Munich) and derived from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) prepared by Clarivate Analytics (formerly the IP and Science business of Thomson Reuters). We thank three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support was provided by the German Academic Exchange Service Program “IPID4all”, mediated by the TU Dresden Graduate Academy and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the TU Dresden Institutional Strategy by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments, for the preparation of this manuscript.