What does your school invest in an A-journal article?

What this does not price

This is the investment line of an account whose return line has never been opened.

The estimate above tells you what the school puts in. It does not tell you what came back. The academic side of that question has an elaborate apparatus behind it, built over decades, and all of it measures attention from other researchers, which is a real thing to measure and is not the same thing as a return. On the economic side there is almost nothing, at any school, in any country, under any framework built so far.

So read the figure for what it is. It describes a serious investment, made deliberately, by institutions that are good at what they do. None of this is an argument for investing less in scholarship. It is an argument that an organization spending at this scale should be able to say what it spends, before anyone reaches the harder question of what it earned.

The method, and where the judgment sits

The calculation. Multiply the tenure-stream salary base by the share of faculty effort allocated to research, then divide by the number of A-list articles produced in a year. Add benefits if your salary figure excludes them, which it usually does. The approach is not mine. Roger Martin set it out while sitting dean of the Rotman School, in the Academy of Management Learning and Education in 2012, and every serious attempt since has used some version of it.

Who counts. This is the decision that moves the answer most, and it is the easiest one to get wrong. A departmental roster is not a research faculty. A substantial share of the people on one hold clinical, of instruction, of practice, adjunct or lecturer appointments and carry no research expectation at all, so counting the department rather than the faculty can overstate the base by a wide margin. Chairs, department heads and associate deans do belong in it, since they hold tenure-stream appointments and are still expected to publish, and a unit that looks administrative from its name alone may hold some of the most expensive researchers in the building. Check the units rather than trusting their labels.

Why the credit dial exists. Two schools can both claim the same co-authored article, so counting every article once for every school that touched it produces a different denominator than crediting each school its share. There is no settled convention, and the choice moves the answer substantially. I have not made it for you.

What this leaves out. Research assistants, databases, software, travel, course releases, conference presentations, summer support, facilities, and every project that consumed resources without producing a publication. Whatever this returns, your real figure is higher.

Why a range. The salary side can be exact, because your finance office knows it to the dollar. Everything downstream of it is a judgment. A single number would claim a precision the inputs do not support.

Build it in your own spreadsheet

You do not need this page. The whole argument is that this figure has always been within reach, so here is the arithmetic in a form you can put in front of your own finance office, with your own roster and your own rates.

Five cells and one formula. Your version will be better than anything produced from outside, because you can replace the two figures that weaken every external estimate: the benefits rate, which payroll knows exactly, and the article count, which your own office already reports to your accreditor.

To rebuild the sensitivity grid, put your article counts across row 9 starting in B9, put your research shares down column A starting in A10, then enter the formula below in B10 and fill it right and down. The mixed references are what let one formula serve the whole grid.