Academic leadership of high-performing research groups

We constructed a multidimensional academic performance index using data from PubMed, the Web of Knowledge, and our own survey on academic leadership of 185 biomedical and health care research group leaders in the Netherlands. The research groups cover the various main types of research in the biomedical and health sciences: pre-clinical (fundamental research in natural and life sciences), clinical (application-oriented clinical research), and para-clinical (social sciences-oriented research). We investigated the effects of group size, funding sources, research involvement, time allocation, research communication and other relevant issues. Our results show that the leaders of high-performing groups differ from the leaders of the other groups, as they possess a stronger research commitment, put more effort in group management and spend more time on network management. In sum, leaders of high-performing research groups tend to be all-rounders.