Multi-national study challenges long-held assumptions about efficiency.

23 May 2018

Smriti Mallapaty

Scientists are more efficient at producing high-quality research when they have more academic freedom, according to a recent study of 18 economically advanced countries. Researchers in the Netherlands are the most efficient of all.

The existence of a national evaluation system that is not tied to funding was also associated with efficiency, the study finds.

The analysis challenges the prevailing view that competition for funding and strong university management drive efficiency. “For both variables we find the opposite,” says Peter Van den Besselaar, an informatics researcher at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who co-authored the paper with Ulf Sandström at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Pros and cons of competition

Until recently, studies into research efficiency usually looked at the attributes of countries that scored highly when measuring their inputs (funding) against their outputs (publications) in absolute terms. Van den Besselaar and Sandström looked instead at relative changes, to gauge a system’s efficiency at converting additional funding to additional publications.

Specifically, they assessed how a change in spending on higher education between 2000 and 2009 contributed to a change in authorship in the top 10% of highly cited papers in the Web of Science database. In this assessment, the Netherlands scored the highest, with a funding-to-publication ratio of 2.67, followed by Belgium.

see full text

The full article can be downloaded from here

11 Jul 2017

The Nobel laureate discusses his dissatisfaction with the state of quantum physics and suggests a new way to move forward.
Melinda Baldwin

The laws of quantum mechanics seem to tell us that there is a fundamental random component to the universe. But Gerard ’t Hooft, who received the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work on gauge theories in particle physics, is not convinced that physicists have to abandon determinism.

In his new book, The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Springer, 2016), ’t Hooft suggests that we may simply be lacking the data that would turn quantum probability distributions into specific predictions. Reviewer Stefano Forte praises it as a “beautifully written, entertaining, and provocative book” that “will dwarf all other contributions ’t Hooft has given to science” if correct. The book is also open access, available as a free e-book on Springer’s website.

See full text

NOTE: You can freely download his book