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摘要

Academic institutions in the United States comprise a complex system of state-supported and private universities, all largely independent of one another. Although they use a similar system for evaluating researchers for hiring, promotion and tenure (in most cases, letters from experts in the field hold the most sway) Nature's interviews with nearly a dozen deans, provosts and department heads showed considerable variation.rnFor example, many universities pay close attention to a candidate's ability to raise grant money. And for some the source counts: at Arizona State University in Tempe, provost Betty Capaldi says that funding from the US National Science Foundation is regarded as more prestigious than funding from the US National Institutes of Health, because the former is considered more competitive. By contrast, Marc Kastner, dean of the School of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that the amount of funding almost never comes into consideration for a researcher's promotion. "If someone can have a strong impact on an international community without any funding, more power to them," he says.