National scientific facilities and their science impact on nonbiomedical research

The "h index" proposed by Hirsch [Hirsch JE (2005) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102:16569-16573] is a good indicator of the impact of a scientist's research and has the advantage of being objective. When evaluating departments, institutions, or laboratories, the importance of the h index can be further enhanced when it is properly calibrated for the size of the group. Particularly acute is the issue of federally funded facilities whose number of actively publishing scientists frequently dwarfs that of academic departments. Recently, Molinari and Molinari [Molinari JF, Molinari A (2008) Scientometrics, in press] developed a methodology that shows that the h index has a universal growth rate for large numbers of papers, allowing for meaningful comparisons between institutions. An additional challenge when comparing large institutions is that fields have distinct internal cultures, with different typical rates of publication and citation; biology is more highly cited than physics, for example. For this reason, the present study has focused on the physical sciences, engineering, and technology and has excluded biomedical research. Comparisons between individual disciplines are reported here to provide a framework. Generally, it was found that the universal growth rate of Molinari and Molinari holds well across the categories considered, testifying to the robustness of both their growth law and our results. The goal here is to set the highest standard of comparison for federal investment in science. Comparisons are made of the nation's preeminent private and public institutions. We find that many among the national science facilities compare favorably in research impact with the nation's leading universities.