28 August 2015 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
Research funding and talent concentration is the round-about topic of an article in the Times Higher this week, which gets to the point via a German study on performance-related pay. Germany introduced performance-related pay for academics in 2005, and the research since has found that it has resulted in a boost in academic productivity. However, the article describes how the increase in productivity has come about from the way PRP seems to have caused the best academics to group together in the same institutions and research groups, with lower-performing departments on average losing their best scholars to higher-performing ones. According to the article, “this kind of clustering is known as 'positive assortative matching'” where “the best scholars seek out similarly talented colleagues to work with in order to boost their productivity, just as highly educated or wealthy people look for mates with similar traits. Concentrating workers into high productivity and low productivity clusters results in higher production overall than when groups contain a mixture of talents”.
However the study also points out that a more concentrated and more productive research base may “come at the cost of providing good scientific education to many people, all over a country”. It also doesn’t clarify whether the relatively short-term improvement will have longer-term consequences for national research strength.
