Why do scientists at "elite" universities dominate scientific discourse?

We all know that scientists at elite universities publish a lot more papers than scientists at other universities. Why is that? Is it because those universities have better labs and equipment? Is it because the scientists at elite universities are smarter than other scientists? Is it because of the reputation of the universities that makes it easier to get papers accepted in the best journals?

A group of scientists at the University of Colorado (Boulder, Colorado, USA) decided to examine the question and they came up with another answer—one that I have long suspected.

Zhang, S., Wapman, K.H., Larremore, D.B. and Clauset, A. (2022) Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities. Science Advances 8:eabq7056. [doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq70]

Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige can drive such epistemic disparity, but the mechanisms by which it causes increased faculty productivity remain unknown. Here, we combine employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system to show through multiple lines of evidence that the greater availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions drives the environmental effect of prestige on productivity. In particular, greater environmental prestige leads to larger faculty-led research groups, which drive higher faculty productivity, primarily in disciplines with group collaboration norms. In contrast, productivity does not increase substantially with prestige for faculty publications without group members or for group members themselves. The disproportionate scientific productivity of elite researchers can be largely explained by their substantial labor advantage rather than inherent differences in talent.

Basically what they found was that productivity is related to the work environment and not necessarily the quality of the PI. This fits with what we often see; namely that the most famous and most productive scientists at those elite universities are often quite stupid no more intelligent than scientists at other universities.

So, what is it about the work environment that leads to better productivity? It's the quality and quantity of the graduate students and postdocs. Scientists at elite univerisites are able to build bigger and better groups because they can attract the best graduate students and postdocs.

... the greater productivity of elite faculty can be attributed to a substantial labor advantage that they hold over faculty at less prestigious institutions, which translates into increased faculty productivity in disciplines where faculty lead and coauthor with a group of junior researchers. Hence, the productivity dominance of researchers at elite institutions is not due to inherent characteristics such as greater skill or insight or to their academic pedigree but rather can be explained by the greater labor resources accorded to them by their prestigious location within the academic system.

That might explain productivity but it leaves us with another problem. We can agree that the faculty may not be any smarter than average, but the graduate students and postdocs should be the best of the best. That should mean that the quality of the papers published by the group at elite universities should be superior to papers published by groups at "lesser" universities. That doesn't always seem to be the case (ENCODE).

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The photo shows the front of the Zoology building at Stanford University with the statue of Louis Agassiz that was toppled during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This prompted a passing scientist to note that, "Louis Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete." [Was Louis Agassiz better in the concrete?]