MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines

Bruce G Charlton writes "In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world. This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions." If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below.
"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."

Comments

Gatherers vs. Hunters

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

From TFS:

Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end.

I attended Harvard for Ph.D. work, and can say that there has been a feminization of science; which is characterized, above all, by a gatherer-mentality (quantity over quality).

My peers at MIT, I remember, were doing risky and testosterone-laden work; they are the hunters.

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

[Otter]

I'd say that given that these "studies" (I'm not sure how they count three of them) are basically counting Nobel prizes, the trend simply reflects changes in what wins Nobels. When the awards were dominated by traditional medicine and physiology, Harvard Med School owned them, and MIT and some of the other competitors mentioned don't even have med schools.

A Study?

[optimusNauta]

If this guy really wans to study something like this, he needs to sit down and read some friggin' articles and come up with a metric to say whether an article is revolutionary. For example, Field's medals only honor Mathematicians younger than 40, and are only awards to one person ever some odd years, so that if two "revolutionary" papers are written in the same period, one gets nothing. In general the sample size of this "study", namely thee dozen prestigious awards of the past decade or two, is laughably small, and the only real result of his work is the suggestion that their should be more awards like the Nobels. To say that any one university tops any other from the information presented is foolish at best.