Research Performance of Federal Research Centers: Is There Any Effect from Restructuring?

Abstract

The stated main goal of restructuring the network of scientific organizations that was accompanied by the creation of Federal Research Centers (FRCs) was to increase their efficiency, that is, specific research performance. The first FRCs were established in 2014. Despite the ambiguous attitude of the academic community to the amalgamation of institutes and the FRC management experience accumulated to date, there are still no quantitative studies of the effect of the amalgamation of institutes and the creation of multidisciplinary regional research centers. This work attempts to fill this gap with the help of a specially developed research performance indicator that allows a comparison of scientific organizations by efficiency in different areas of research, with multitopic studies included. The results show that, generally speaking, the expected rise in performance has not been achieved and the success of individual research centers is quite comparable to the rise in performance of top institutes that were not exposed to restructuring.