National Scientific Facilities and Their Science Impact on Non-Biomedical Research

TL;DR

This study evaluates the research impact of national scientific facilities in non-biomedical fields using the h-index, demonstrating their competitive standing against leading universities through a universal growth law.

Contribution

It applies Molinari and Molinari's universal h-index growth law to compare large federal facilities with top institutions, focusing on physical sciences, engineering, and technology.

Findings

Molinari and Molinari's growth law holds across studied categories.

Many national facilities have research impact comparable to leading universities.

The study provides a standardized comparison framework for federal science investments.

Abstract

H-index, proposed by Hirsch is a good indicator of the impact of a scientist's research. When evaluating departments, institutions or labs, the importance of h-index can be further enhanced when properly calibrated for size. Particularly acute is the issue of federally funded facilities whose number of actively publishing scientists frequently dwarfs that of academic departments. Recently Molinari and Molinari developed a methodology that shows the h-index has a universal growth rate for large numbers of papers, allowing for meaningful comparisons between institutions. An additional challenge when comparing large institutions is that fields have distinct internal cultures, with different typical rates of publication and citation; biology is more highly cited than physics, which is more highly cited than engineering. For this reason, this study has focused on the physical sciences, engineering, and technology, and has excluded bio-medical research. Comparisons between individual disciplines are reported here to provide contextual framework. Generally, it was found that the universal growth rate of Molinari and Molinari holds well across all the categories considered, testifying to the robustness of both their growth law and our results. The overall goal here is to set the highest standard of comparison for federal investment in science; comparisons are made with the nations preeminent private and public institutions. We find that many among the national facilities compare favorably in research impact with the nations leading universities.