I've seen some pretty worthless technical papers published, I'm sure for the sake of publishing the paper, padding statistics, etc. Not the best measure.
Measuring research "productivity" is problematic. I can see A&M being on the low end of the list, but Johns Hopkins? Maybe so. But even with the problems of measuring research productivity, there are problems with unproductive tenured faculty and with bogus academic departments, especially the ethnic disciplines (womens' studies, eg). So there are cost savings available within universities. Maybe UT needs to bring Yudoff back to handle this?
All that may be true, but does Harvard compare to aggy in alchemy research? Our little brother is peerless in that department.
