When a sports manager poaches a player from a rival team, fans make plenty of noise, but the end result is generally a more exciting league. It is a different matter when a team scout manipulates the transfer market in the academic world. Headhunters seek out the biggest names in science and recruit them to their side with offers of better financial rewards and bright new labs. But the research repertoire of the poached department is left with a gaping hole in the field, and the league tables are distorted.

In the United Kingdom, over the last few years, there has been a worrying increase in the incidence of poached professors, with events in September 2000 highlighting the state of play in the ivory towers. Although a spokesman for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) vehemently denies that they have found any evidence of poaching at all, others hold the opposite view.

Reaching the top of the league and winning the cup are, as in sport, great motivators for research. Almost every scientist wants his name at the top of the rankings and his department to get the five-star awards in assessment programs. Indeed, once every four to five years, the U.K. government instigates a championship tournament among the universities to provide it with a league table on which research funding can be based. The last of these Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) was in 1996 and the next one is due in 2001.

The RAE enables higher education funding bodies to distribute public funds for research on the basis of quality. The best institutions get the biggest slice of the pie, with almost £7 billion likely to be distributed after RAE 2001. Research assessment is now considered an essential element in selecting departments for funding. The RAE cost about £37 million ($50 million) in 1996, but advocates emphasize that this is a tiny fraction of the rewards. Interestingly, some 44 percent of universities have departments that were awarded a 5 or 5-star grade.

The RAEs are hard work - for the assessors and the assessed - and come under severe fire from several quarters, not the least being those departments which, having put in great efforts to improve their profile under the system, find themselves graded lower than they had hoped. On the other hand, the departments that obtain the highest scores can be proud of their achievements and use their status to the fullest in attracting not only better funding, but higher-caliber students as well.

In the run up to RAE 2001, though, there are increasing worries that transfers between university research departments are again being manipulated, not because of the personal aspirations of the individuals involved, but at the faculty level. The result is that possibly previously low-ranked institutions can boost their record simply by recruiting a famous name. It is easy to see why this might be considered a fruitful tactic to employ. One of the criteria of the RAE adjudicators is the quality of published research. Even if you have a decent group in a particular department, its papers may not have as high an impact factor because of the degree of specialization in a small research niche. Recruit a big name with lots of highly cited papers and you instantaneously bump up your statistics.

According to Brian Iddon, a former chemist and now the member of Parliament for Bolton, South East in the north of England, the research assessment exercise created divisions between universities and has led to poaching of staff from excellent science and engineering departments, especially where large research groups published many papers. The administrators of RAE 2001 hope to sidestep the problem. One approach to stopping this seemingly unsporting behavior might be to weigh the impact of individual scientists who excel in small niche areas against their counterparts in wider fields. This might, ultimately, reduce what some observers have described as "the wasteful disruption of research caused by the poaching of research stars." It would not, however, inhibit the normal movement of academics between institutions for sensible, personal reasons.

Moreover, those to be assessed during RAE 2001 have the option of including big-name "A-star" ex-members of staff who transferred to positions in other institutions in the year leading up to the final assessment date. This option is turning into something of a bureaucratic minefield, though, with departments having no way of keeping track of hundreds of research assistants and whether they left at the same time as their research supervisor to go to the same institution and so determining whether someone's team was poached or not [1]. The individual's new institution will also have the option of including their new recruit in their return to the assessor.

According to Bahram Bekhradnia, HEFCE's director of policy, there was actually more movement of academic staff after the last RAE than there was in the year or two before it. Although it has been reported that at least 500 more academics moved during the "poaching season" before RAE 1996 than was predicted [2].

Bekhradnia says in an assessment of the assessment, "Some selective recruitment and poaching does take place, but there is absolutely no evidence that it is on a wide scale or that it is damaging." Others have pointed out that there is more movement in the United States and that the United Kingdom might actually benefit from more of it.

New universities - the former polytechnics and institutes of higher and further education - are all now included in the RAEs so there is a much wider market from which to poach and more centers keen to skim off the cream intellects. One worrying side effect of this has been highlighted by Lord Dainton, a former government scientific adviser, who believes research quality will suffer as the best scientists are spread ever more thinly.

Several of the newer British universities, which were generally considered to be vocational learning centers under their previous remit as "polytechnics" (which changed in 1990), have recruited many new researchers ahead of the next RAE. But, this activity is not limited to the new universities.

Seven polymer chemists from Lancaster University moved to the University of Sheffield last year with the enticement of better funding from an already highly rated department. The group is internationally rated and Anthony Ryan, head of chemistry at Sheffield, said at the time, "The arrival of this group creates one of the largest clusters of polymer academics in the U.K. and will make us an important player on the world stage."

Dainton has pointed out that the older leading universities such as Oxford and Cambridge were supposedly less likely to be poached from because they can already offer better perks and more pay. But in September 2000, London's Imperial College (IC) grabbed three leading researchers from Oxford together with their research teams, amounting to some 80 new staff. Brian Spratt, Geoff Smith and Roy Anderson will help establish IC's new center for infection, immunology and epidemiology at the former medical school attached to St. Mary's Hospital, London. These star players will take with them grants amounting to £7 million from the Wellcome Trust, the United Kingdom's biggest medical research charity. For its part, Oxford pointed out it had recruited new teaching and research staff from Israel, Texas, Australia, and Russia, as well as two scientists from Cambridge and another from IC itself.

So, is the movement that is seen in academia simply a consequence of institutions actively upgrading their research departments and, therefore, a positive thing? Or, is it manipulative behavior? "One of the more usual perks for 'poaching' is promotion to professor from, say, reader or senior lecturer," says Charles Christacopoulos, of the Secretary's Office Management Information Services at the University of Dundee, "In practice, you get professors in their early thirties with little understanding of the wider world and 'all' the implications of their research."

The consequences of poaching are rather more serious than the difference between a nice report and a great report. A 5-star department can expect 20 percent greater financing from HEFCE than a grade-5, while departments achieving the lowest standards might face amalgamation or, worse, closure. Other efforts to create disincentives to poaching might be to force departments to consider a minimum percentage of their staff in their report to the RAE assessors for them even to be considered for the highest rank [3].

Diana Warwick, chief executive of U.K. Universities, a representative body of university bosses, speaking at the Institute of Physics Congress 2000 in Brighton in March of this year, said "Our view about reports of manipulative behavior - such as poaching or dropping of staff - for the exercise is that they are exaggerated, and we expect studies of staff movements in the period leading up to the RAE to demonstrate this."

Poaching is common practice in business. Small businesses with modest training budgets, for instance, simply head-hunt trained people from larger rivals. As academia moves toward a greater commercial awareness and pressure is applied by governments for universities to increasingly contribute toward wealth creation and technology transfer, one cannot expect it to do anything but recruit the best players it can.

It would, however, take many years for government funds to spin off activities that provide sufficient employment or income generation to be worthy of the investment. Indeed, university start-ups could go bust just as easily as commercial ventures.

Maybe the poaching concept is simply a symptom of the drive toward a knowledge economy where intellectual property and intellect itself become the basis of the skill set for those who play the hardest and win the most games. Christacopoulos says, "Any good institution, with well-rated departments, can expect, indeed should expect, and maybe look forward to losing some staff . . . at the end of the day staff turnover is a healthy phenomenon."