Benchmarking of RTD policies in Europe: ‘research collectives’ as an entry point for renewed comparative analyses

Abstract

The paper proposes, following results in science studies, another entry point to the international comparison of RDT policies, focusing on the productive entities in research, that is the research laboratories or collectives. However before going to comparison of performance, account must be taken of the vector of outputs constituting research activities and of the choices made by laboratories as witnessed by their effective activity profiles. This is illustrated by an experiment done on 400 labs in Human genetics in six European countries. It shows that the well known and striking differences between EU nations, in terms of institutional structures and access to resources, do not directly translate into different productive patterns of research collectives, thus emphasizing the self-dynamics of both given organisations and, more important, of their research collectives.