  Unlike competitive higher education systems, non-competitive systems show
relatively uniform distributions of top professors and low performers among
universities. In this study, we examine the impact of unproductive and top
faculty members on overall research performance of the university they belong
to. Furthermore, we analyze the potential relationship between research
productivity of a university and the indexes of concentration of unproductive
and top professors. Research performance is evaluated using a bibliometric
approach, through publications indexed on the Web of Science between 2004 and
2008. The set analyzed consists of all Italian universities active in the hard
sciences.
