  There is nowadays considerable interest on ways to quantify the dynamics of
research activities, in part due to recent changes in research and development
(R&D) funding. Here, we seek to quantify and analyze university research
activities, and compare their growth dynamics with those of business firms.
Specifically, we analyze five distinct databases, the largest of which is a
National Science Foundation database of the R&D expenditures for science and
engineering of 719 United States (US) universities for the 17-year period
1979--1995. We find that the distribution of growth rates displays a
``universal'' form that does not depend on the size of the university or on the
measure of size used, and that the width of this distribution decays with size
as a power law. Our findings are quantitatively similar to those independently
uncovered for business firms, and consistent with the hypothesis that the
growth dynamics of complex organizations may be governed by universal
mechanisms.
