University Times

Pitt ranked eighth nationally in a new study on research productivity that measured research expenditures per published paper, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week.

A study of 72 of the nation’s largest public and private research institutions examined expenditure data reported by the institutions to the National Science Foundation from 1989 to 2004. The study was conducted by Jeffrey M. Litwin, associate dean at George Brown College in Toronto.

The study measured a university’s total research spending against the number of papers its researchers published in scholarly journals.

Litwin’s study showed that Pitt’s average research expenditure per publication was $53,906. That ranked the University eighth most productive nationally among the 72 American institutions that reported the highest research expenditures and that had comparable data on publications as compiled by Thomson Reuters, a New York-based data-gathering company.

The median expenditure per paper was $72,020, according to Litwin’s study.

Penn was ranked as most productive with $28,547 in average expenditure per publication, followed by Harvard ($31,231 per publication) and the University of Chicago ($42,209 per publication).

The study showed the least productive universities in this category were Johns Hopkins ($185,811 per publication), followed by Texas A&M ($128,269) and Carnegie Mellon ($118,344).

Litwin’s study also showed that private research universities on average were more efficient than public ones, the Chronicle reported.

Pitt joined three other public universities in the top 10 overall, with Indiana University (No. 4 — $48,851 per publication), Virginia (No. 6 — $50,042) and California-Santa Barbara (No. 7 — $53,471).

The Chronicle’s coverage of Litwin’s study is available at http://chronicle.com/article/Johns-Hopkins-Texas-A-M-Were/127603/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=enm.

—Peter Hart