Scientific output in Chile: limitations in the use of performance indicators to evaluate public universities

In 2015, the 25 universities that are members of the association of public universities (CRUCH) received $15.3 million as a reward for performance. The money that each university received depended on its position in the ranking of performance indicators. The performance indicator with the highest weight is the index of productivity (35%), which represents the ratio between the number of indexed publications divided by the number of academics at each university. This index does not distinguish publications by areas of knowledge, by quality or by intellectual author. Because of this, the index has been criticized as an unfair way to rank universities. To study this, we analyze 10.377 papers indexed in the Web of Science by CRUCH universities in 2015. Our objective is to study the unintended consequences of the use of indexed publications as an indicator of productivity and estimate its impact on finance equity among universities and topics.