German Universities Boost Research Output, But Causes Unclear

German leaders are debating the future of a program intended to help its elite universities compete in research with the likes of Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. The 11-year, €4.6 billion (USD$5B) Excellence Initiative was launched in 2006, and has provided funding to support clusters of excellence, international graduate schools and strategies to strengthen the institutions as a whole. Since the program began, Germany’s universities have greatly increased their research publication output and their number of highly-cited articles. However, an analysis by Nature finds that much of that increased output has come from second- and third-tier schools that received less support through the initiative. In a similar study, academics found that China’s 985 Project to boost research competitiveness had a great effect on output at lower-ranked universities.

Germany’s key national research funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), issued a report on the Excellence Initiative earlier this month in advance of a comprehensive evaluation due in January 2016. The results of that evaluation will determine the future of the program. A total of 45 universities received support through the program, with a subset of 14 elite universities receiving additional funding. Much of this support is used to recruit foreign scientists and to encourage German-trained scientists who have gone abroad to return. The DFG report notes that the program has helped attract about 4,000 scientists from other countries to German institutions.

Since the effort launched in 2006, Germany’s ascendency in research competitiveness has been remarkable. German universities have increased their output in chemistry and physics by 34 percent, with that figure reaching 43 percent at the 45 universities receiving initiative support. One-quarter of the articles produced at the country’s 14 elite institutions is now in the world’s top 10 percent by citation, according to Nature.

The Excellence initiative, however, does not seem to have led to an elite class of universities that compete with research institutions in Germany’s peer countries. The July 2015 update of the Center for University World Rankings is dominated by U.S. institutions, such as Harvard, Stanford and MIT, in terms of research publication, influence and citations, followed by Cambridge and Oxford in the UK. The top German institutions, the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, rank in the 50s and 60s in these areas.

Instead, Nature notes that many universities that received less funding, or no funding, increased their research output and quality by as much as the institutions that benefited more from the Excellence Initiative. Much of the improvement in Germany’s overall research output has come from these second- and third-tier institutions, making it less clear how effective the initiative has been. It is possible that the investment has had an external effect that have boosted research at other institutions, but interviews conducted by Nature indicate that many believe much of the funding has been spent on administration rather than research. This would mean there have been other factors that have driven the German research boom.

Access the DFG report (currently only in German) at: http://www.dfg.de/service/presse/pressemitteilungen/2015/pressemitteilun...

Read the Nature analysis: http://www.nature.com/news/germany-claims-success-for-elite-universities-drive-1.18312?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews#/chart

Interestingly, China also launched a program in 2006 to create globally competitive universities, but has had most of its growth driven by lower-tier institutions. In a 2013 article, Han Zhang, Donald Patton and Martin Kenney examine the impact of the 985 project, which focused on boosting research publication at 24 universities. Controlling for university R&D funding, institution personnel size, and per capita income, they found that growth in publication at lower-ranked institutions following the launch of the program outpaced growth at the country’s two highest-ranked universities. While the program may have had limited success in bolstering the rank of these top universities, the researchers conclude that the rate of growth in publications at all universities as a whole increased after the program was implemented.

Purchase Building Global-Class Universities: Assessing the Impact of the 986 Project at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733312002302.