Sound research, unimportant discoveries: Research, universities, and formal evaluation of research in Spain

Nobel Prizes are an important indicator of research excellence for a country. Spain has not had a science Nobel Prize winner since 1906, although its gross domestic product (GDP) is high, research and development (R&D) investments, in monetary terms, are high, and conventional bibliometric parameters are fairly good. Spanish research produces many sound papers that are reasonably cited but does not produce top-cited publications. This absence of top-cited publications suggests that important achievements are scarce and, consequently, explains the absence of Nobel Prize awards. I argue that this negative research trend in Spain is caused by the extensive use of formal research evaluations based on the number of publications, impact factors, and journal rankings. These formal evaluations were introduced to establish a national salary bonus that mitigated the lack of research incentives in universities. When the process was started, the results were excellent but, currently, it has been kept too long and should be replaced by methods to determine the actual interest of the research. However, this replacement requires greater involvement of universities in stimulating research.