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Is there a more thorough study of the scientific and intellectual productivity of people studying whatever they want and fooling around? This makes me wonder ab

• privong 9y ago
  > This makes me wonder about the culture I saw in graduate school where many professors seemed spend more time getting funding and publications than research. Was there a time when it was different? I don't have any objective data about how much time was spent on grants as a function of time, but just from talking to faculty (in astronomy and physics) the universal feeling is that they spend more of their time on grants and proposals than they did in the past. I am not entirely sure what the dominant cause is, but it is probably partly that grant overheads can contribute significantly to a university/college operating budget. It also wouldn't surprise me if the overall cost of doing research is increasing, owing to the need to obtain cutting-edge equipment which is generally not yet able to take advantage of economies of scale. Lastly, the size of academia has increased while funding levels have not kept up (this is particularly true in the past ~decade) so the available funding per researcher has dropped, making grants much more competitive. When grant acceptance rates drop below 10% (as is true in some fields), you have to spend a lot more time on the proposal to stand a chance of winning a grant, compared to how much time you might need to spend if the acceptance rate was in the 25-40% range.