The Happy Medium

Mid-sized labs do best, says Jeremy Berg, the director of National Institute of General Medical Sciences who is known for blog posts chock full of data, reports Nature. Berg mined NIH data to study correlations between grant size and scientific output. He tells Nature that people had long said that once a lab grows large enough to be unwieldy to manage, it will see its number of publications per grant dollar decline, but that "no one actually had the data to put that in more quantitative terms." Plotting median number of publications and median impact factor against NIH funding, Berg found that both measures topped out at $750,000 in yearly funding. He notes, however, that "the average behaviour is not the behaviour of everybody." Check it out here.