A story of research princes and paupers is told in today's figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) - and the paupers seem to be working very hard to keep up.
Today's performance indicators are an attempt to show value for money when it comes to research spending, though the compilers admit it can only show quantity rather than quality. They measure academics' productivity by showing how much extra money they bring in through grants from the research councils and other bodies or industrial contracts on top of the basic bread and butter money they receive from the funding councils in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
At the bottom of the research pile, Lincoln, University College Worcester, Canterbury Christ Church University, Derby, Thames Valley and London Metropolitan University are leveraging their basic funding into between 12 and 23 times as much as the national average. But they are starting with tiny sums. Lincoln received £33,000 in 2003-04, the latest year for which figures are available, compared with £73.7m at Cambridge.
These institutions are compelled to seek out commercial contracts and research council grants partly because they get so little from the funding councils in so-called quality research (QR) money for laboratories and salaries, distributed on the basis of the research assessment exercise (RAE).
Proportionately, the research giants don't bring in as much on top of their funding council allocation. Cambridge seems to be making its money sweat harder than Oxford and other rivals, although Edinburgh does notably better with 1.3 times the national average on its £38.8m basic research funding.
The figures will add to the arguments of the new universities that research funding should not be concentrated ever more selectively on a few major centres. Comparatively small sums allocated to the small fry can yield disproportionate benefits, they argue.
But it is not only in sheer research income that a premier league has evolved - when it comes to awarding PhDs, which is seen as a form of intellectual vitality and nurturing the next generation of academics, there are only five which clock up more than 500 a year: Cambridge (920); Oxford (705); newly merged Manchester (660); University College London (655); Birmingham (570); and Imperial College (515).