  An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research
institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation
exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top
scientists are dispersed among all the universities, rather than concentrated
among a few, there is a high risk of penalizing those top scientists who work
in lower-performance universities. Using a five-year bibliometric analysis
conducted on all Italian universities active in the hard sciences from
2004-2008, this work analyzes the distribution of publications and relevant
citations by scientists within the universities, measures the research
performance of individual scientists, quantifies the intensity of concentration
of top scientists at each university, provides performance rankings for the
universities, and indicates the effects of selective funding on the top
scientists of low-ranked universities.
