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Research groups: How big should they be?

ABSTRACT: Understanding the relationship between scientific productivity and research group size is important for deciding how science should be funded. We have investigated the relationship between these variables in the life sciences in the United Kingdom using data from 398 principle investigators (PIs). We show that three measures of productivity, the number of publications, the impact factor of the journals in which papers are published and the number of citations, are all positively correlated to group size, although they all show a pattern of diminishing returns-doubling group size leads to less than a doubling in productivity. The relationships for the impact factor and the number of citations are extremely weak. Our analyses suggest that an increase in productivity will be achieved by funding more PIs with small research groups, unless the cost of employing post-docs and PhD students is less than 20% the cost of a PI. We also provide evidence that post-docs are more productive than PhD students both in terms of the number of papers they produce and where those papers are published.

SUBMITTER: Cook I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4465944 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is the only biomedical imaging method that can noninvasively detect endogenous signals from the neurotransmitter γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the human brain. Its increasing popularity has been aided by improvements in scanner hardware and acquisition methodology, as well as by broader access to pulse sequences that can selectively detect GABA, in particular J-difference spectral editing sequences. Nevertheless, implementations of GABA-edited MRS remain diverse across research sites, making comparisons between studies challenging. This large-scale multi-vendor, multi-site study seeks to better understand the factors that impact measurement outcomes of GABA-edited MRS. An international consortium of 24 research sites was formed. Data from 272 healthy adults were acquired on scanners from the three major MRI vendors and analyzed using the Gannet processing pipeline. MRS data were acquired in the medial parietal lobe with standard GABA+ and macromolecule- (MM-) suppressed GABA editing. The coefficient of variation across the entire cohort was 12% for GABA+ measurements and 28% for MM-suppressed GABA measurements. A multilevel analysis revealed that most of the variance (72%) in the GABA+ data was accounted for by differences between participants within-site, while site-level differences accounted for comparatively more variance (20%) than vendor-level differences (8%). For MM-suppressed GABA data, the variance was distributed equally between site- (50%) and participant-level (50%) differences. The findings show that GABA+ measurements exhibit strong agreement when implemented with a standard protocol. There is, however, increased variability for MM-suppressed GABA measurements that is attributed in part to differences in site-to-site data acquisition. This study's protocol establishes a framework for future methodological standardization of GABA-edited MRS, while the results provide valuable benchmarks for the MRS community.

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Research groups: How big should they be?

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