Despite Money Poured into SNU, few Scholarly Papers Produced

For four years the government poured vast amounts of money into Seoul National University (SNU) in order to improve its science and engineering graduate schools. However, SNU, who received more grant money from the government than any other university in Korea, has produced very few scholarly papers.
According to a sourse from the Ministry of Education, a government grant worth 24 billion won ($20,869,000) was awarded to the graduate schools in science and engineering at SNU in order to support their programs from 1995 through 1999. Funds raised by SNU and other supporting industries amounted to 54.6 million won ($47,478,000), and which were poured into the programs at the same time. However, SNU only produced 4.1 papers per professor during this period, which is a drop from the previous 5.1.
The overall number of papers from the Department of Natural Science was reduced by 9.9% from 801 in 1995 to 722 in 1999.
In 1999 alone, the number of papers produced by each SNU professor and reported to the Science Citation Index (SCI) was 2.2, which is far below the number of papers produced by the Pohang University of Science and Technology (6.3), Yonsei University (3.1), Korea University (3.8), and Hanyang University (5.2), who all participated in the same government funding program.
Between 1995 and 1999, the number of SCI papers produced by each professor at SNU increased by only 14.3 percent which is far behind Pohang (133.3 percent), Yonsei (82.4 percent), Korea (280 percent), and Hanyang (333.3 percent).
An official at the Ministry of Education said, "At Seoul National University the money was invested into the field of pure science. Therefore, one should not simply compare the number of academic papers of SNU or its rate of increase with other universities since they have received money for applied science or engineering fields."

by Kang Hong-joon