The ratio of top scientists to the academic staff as an indicator of the competitive strength of universities

TL;DR

This paper proposes using the ratio of top scientists to total academic staff as an indicator of university competitiveness, analyzing Italian universities across various fields and comparing it with overall productivity rankings.

Contribution

It introduces a new metric based on top scientists' ratio to evaluate university strength and compares it with traditional productivity-based rankings.

Findings

Top scientist ratio varies significantly across universities and fields.

Higher ratios correlate with higher overall university rankings.

University size has a limited effect on the top scientist ratio.

Abstract

The ability to attract and retain talented professors is a distinctive competence of world-class universities and a source of competitive advantage. The ratio of top scientists to academic staff could therefore be an indicator of the competitive strength of the universities. This work identifies the Italian top scientists in over 200 fields, by their research productivity. It then ranks the relative universities by the ratio of top scientists to overall faculty. Finally, it contrasts this list with the ranking list by average productivity of the overall faculty. The analysis is carried out at the field, discipline, and overall university levels. The paper also explores the secondary question of whether the ratio of top scientists to faculty is related to the size of the university.