Prestigious universities tend to dominate the published literature. While we may think that’s down to quality as much as quantity, when it comes to the size of their talent pool, size really does matter. That’s the finding of research from the University of Colorado, Boulder, which shows that more prestigious universities have a bigger pool of undergrads, fellows, and postdocs to help produce a high output of literature.

The researchers trawled through data from the Web of Science to examine the publishing history of American institutions. They wanted to better understand the various factors that underpin the prolific publishing record of prestigious institutions.

Academic success

The researchers analyzed around 1.6 million articles that had been written by nearly 80,000 authors, all of whom were either on a tenure track or were actually tenured. The researchers worked at 26 American universities, all of whom granted Ph.Ds. The study focused particularly on data that helped to describe the productivity of not only the authors as individuals but also of the publishing teams as a whole.

A clear pattern emerged from the analysis, with more prestigious schools seeming to produce significantly more papers than their less prestigious peers. The researchers believe this was likely to be because they have more people available to work in their research teams.

They highlight that there was no real difference in the productivity of researchers, regardless of their seniority, between those at prestigious and less prestigious institutions, it was simply that the prestigious teams tended to have more people in their teams, which enabled them to get more done.

This suggests that if less-prestigious schools want to gain a boost in their publication rates, they could do worse than by increasing the number of people working on their research projects.