Testing the trade-off between productivity and quality in research activities

In recent years there has been an increasingly pressing need for the evaluation of results from public-sector research activity, particularly to permit the efficient allocation of ever scarcer resources. Many of the studies and evaluation exercises that have been conducted at the national and international levels emphasize the quality dimension of research output, while neglecting that of productivity. This work is intended to test for the possible existence of correlation between quantity and quality of scientific production and determine whether the most productive researchers are also those that achieve results that are qualitatively better than those of their colleagues. The analysis proposed refers to the entire Italian university system and is based on the observation of production in the hard sciences by more than 26,000 researchers in the period 2001–2005. The results show that the output of more-productive researchers is superior in quality than that of less-productive researchers. The relation between productivity and quality results is largely insensitive to the types of indicators or the test methods applied and also seems to differ little among the various disciplines examined.